- Post-apocalyptic TV shows are all the rage right now.
- “Paradise,” “Fallout,” and “Silo,” all set in bunkers, have been renewed.
- In turbulent times, audiences like fantasizing about a fresh start.
R.E.M. once sang: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” For buzzy bunker-based TV shows like “Paradise,” “Fallout,” and “Silo,” the apocalypse is just the start of a new adventure — and audiences can’t get enough.
“Paradise” got people talking after the twist in the first episode that it’s set in a small town inside a bunker following a catastrophic event. “Fallout” hit 100 million viewers on Prime Video last October and has a 94% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, with a second season in production. And Apple TV+ subscribers have spent 417 million minutes watching “Silo,” which is returning for third and fourth seasons.
Over the decades, the apocalypse in TV and film has come in different flavors. The aftermath of nuclear disaster was the focus of movies like 1984’s “Threads,” 2009’s “The Road,” and 2014’s “How I Live Now,” while 2011’s “The Walking Dead,” 2021’s “Y: The Last Man,” and 2023’s “The Last of Us” explored zombies and pandemics.
Now, there’s a taste for bunker-based sci-fi shows. “Fallout” follows Lucy (Ella Purnell), a young woman who ventures out of the nuclear bunker where she has always lived to find her father. Meanwhile in “Paradise” and “Silo,” bunkers are the backdrop to murder mysteries linked to the causes of their respective apocalypses.
The apocalypse is an appealing fresh start for some
Matthew Leggatt, a senior lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Winchester, UK, told Business Insider that the state of geopolitics likely partly explains the success of post-apocalyptic shows.
He pointed to President Donald Trump’s “game of nuclear chicken” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his first term, and noted the Doomsday Clock, which monitors the threat of human extinction, moved to 89 seconds to midnight in January — the closest it has been since it was created in 1947.
Such shows “use disaster as a platform to imagine a world where the problems of today — economic, social, and climatic — are resolved by wiping away the present in one single stroke,” he said.
Brian Roedel / Disney
This ties in with the biblical definition of the “apocalypse,” which implies salvation from God, he said.
“This is echoed, to some extent, in these shows which see small communities emerge and come together in the face of disaster,” Leggatt, host of the “Utopian and Dystopian Fictions” podcast, said.
“While these shows can be bleak, dark, and violent they can also offer hope in the form of a fresh start. The writers behind these projects use bunkers as a way of developing their characters further so that they’re driven to look for hope in escaping to the outside world,” he said.
Robert Yeates, an associate professor of American literature at Okayama University, Japan, and the author of “American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction,” told BI that bunkers are a “pressure cooker for intense human dramas” in TV and film.
By presenting characters with “newly unexplored frontiers” in the ruins of the old world, audiences can too consider how they might survive an apocalypse.
Jojo Whilden/Prime Video
Bunkers are pleasingly mysterious
Audiences are also lured in by the “mysteries” bunkers might contain, like who built them, and why, Yeates said.
Colin Furze, a YouTuber and inventor who constructed a bunker in his garden to promote a comedy series about a comet hitting Earth, told BI that his 14 million subscribers “love the idea of something being there that you can’t see” and it provides a form of escapism.
His 2020 video tour of his bunker has 43 million views.
The bunker is complete with a mini-workshop, a bed, sofa, flat-screen TV, and his inventions like a flamethrower-guitar. He also built a separate underground garage under his house, which a contractor estimated would add £500,000 ($640,832) to the value of the property.
That’s small fry compared to Mark Zuckerberg’s 4,500-square-foot underground “shelter” in his Hawaii compound, which he denied is “some kind of doomsday bunker.”
Al Corbi, the president of the bunker company Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments, told CNN that his customers request things like indoor bowling alleys, swimming pools, and shooting ranges.
“We’ve seen a lot more of a focus on entertainment. If you’re going to be able to survive underground, we want you to be having fun,” he said.
That element of fun was big reason why Furze built his bunker.
“Essentially, when I was a kid, I used to make underground dens. I used to live next door to a quarry. We used to go up there digging holes, covering them over making these little bases under the ground. And I’ve always been fascinated by that,” he said.
But for Yeates, our obsession with the bunkers and the apocalypse can be distilled into one central idea: we’re “desperate” to know how the world could be transformed.
“The bunker suggests we intend to stay put, bide our time, and eventually reemerge to salvage whatever life we can from the ruins above,” he said.
