Perfect for an apocalypse! How the nuclear bunker became TV’s hottest property

With tech bros investing in vast underground homes to shield them from future horrors, a slew of ‘bunker-buster’ dramas like Paradise and Silo are asking: do they know something we don’t?

Sam Altman’s got one – although Mark Zuckerberg’s is, apparently, bigger. Peter Thiel’s is described as “mega” and located in New Zealand. These days, a doomsday bunker (or, in Elon Musk’s case, an “apocalypse resort”) is de rigueur for any self-respecting billionaire – enough to make you wonder if they know something we don’t.

A slew of recent dramas suggests that we are fascinated by such impressive underground real estate. Most audacious is Paradise on Disney+, in which tech-billionaire Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) funds a staggeringly elaborate building project under the not-so-subtle codename “Versailles”. Unlike Clive Owen’s Andy Ronson in A Murder at the End of the World, saving a few hand-picked individuals isn’t enough for this girl-boss-cum-tech-bro. Instead, Redmond has gone a step further, building “the world’s largest underground city”, an ersatz all-American suburb, accommodating 25,000 people while a climate catastrophe plays out above their heads.

So convincing is this Truman Show-style facsimile – complete with robo-ducks and a massive lightbulb suspended in the sky – that it’s not until the final moments of the pilot episode that viewers realised where the story was taking place, or what kind of show they were watching.

They weren’t the only ones who fell for the audacious bait-and-switch. “I did not see it coming!” laughs Krys Marshall, who plays secret service agent Nicole Robinson. “Reading the script, I was like, ‘Page 63 … Page 64 … Page 65?!!!’ It was a total shock.”

Now, as Paradise returns for a second season, it does so with a subtler twist up its sleeve. The nukes believed to have detonated topside never went off and the world outside the bunker proves more nuanced than the post-apocalyptic wasteland the survivors below imagined.

“One of the beautiful things about our show is we don’t have this totally dystopian experience of ‘the end of days is the worst of days,’” says Marshall. “We’re watching what happens when folks are down but they’re not out, and how their resilience keeps them alive.”

On the surface at least – no pun intended – it’s a move that sets Paradise at odds with another hugely popular bunker-buster, Fallout. Based on the hit video-game series, a bland corporate elite survives in highly sanitised 1950s-styled bunkers, while the world up above has become “the wasteland”, a horror-show complete with weird mutated monsters and even weirder post-apocalyptic humans, from the mech-suited warrior-monks of the Brotherhood of Steel to the cosplaying Roman soldiers of Caesar’s Legion, who look as if they’ve wandered out of a swords-and-sandals epic and straight into Mad Max’s thunderdome.

The show’s most fascinating character is “the Ghoul” (Walton Goggins), who straddles the apocalyptic divide, since we see him both before the nuclear Armageddon – when he was “pinko” Hollywood actor Cooper Howard – and 200 years later, as a noseless undead gunslinger who relies on medication to stop himself turning “feral”.

How much is left of the Ghoul’s humanity is an open question, but even Fallout’s more straightforward human survivors must emerge from the bunker eventually, and inevitably be changed in the process – like the fairytale heroes who only find themselves after they get lost in the woods. It’s in the wasteland that deep truths are revealed, and the wisdom passed down by a generation of Bunker-Boomers (epitomised by Kyle MacLachlan’s mid-level exec Hank MacLean) is exposed as a tissue of lies and corruption.

“There’s always a moment in these stories where the bunker turns out to be based on deception,” David Pike, author of After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations, says. “It’s an illusion, and it’s not even giving us what it promised. I wonder if that’s partly from the experience of the pandemic, and realising how miserable it actually is to be bunkered.”

Pike traces the current wave of bunker narratives back to Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which features an elite compound in the Colorado Mountains – the same spot chosen for Paradise’s Versailles. “These fictions of billionaires building super shelters and bringing in a carefully selected group are rightwing fantasies,” Pike says. “Everybody outside the bunker turns sort of neo-barbarian, they’re these hordes that are going to do terrible things if we let them in. It’s the same vision of the world that most of the global north has now in terms of borders.”

In these shows, though, the deadliest threat invariably comes from within the bunker – sometimes even from within the “nuclear” family at its heart. Fallout’s Hank MacLean, who turns out to have triggered an atom-bomb himself, is the father of the show’s upbeat protagonist Lucy. The most terrifying character in Paradise is not a brutal denizen of the post-apocalyptic world up above, but Redmond, the ruthless billionaire behind the bunker project. With the help of her pet sociopath Jane, played chillingly by Nicole Brydon Bloom, Redmond schemes and murders her way through Paradise like a subterranean Frank Underwood.

In our own not-quite-apocalyptic world, Bloom is married to Justin Theroux, who plays the Howard-Hughes-like casino proprietor responsible for Fallout’s nuclear winter. “I hadn’t watched it until he got the part,” she admits. “It’s not really my preferred genre. Now I’m obsessed. It’s fantastical and terrifying in its own way. But what really drew me to Paradise is that it could be two years from now, it could be tomorrow.”

Set in the very-near future, Paradise does feel contemporary, and not just because of its climate-conscious message. A key plot point in the first season centred on who was playing a Nintendo games console. Fallout, despite its 1950s aesthetic, is more unapologetically science fiction – taking place, for the most part, a good quarter-millennium into the future.

Apple TV’s Silo, meanwhile, explores a community that’s been bunkered so long it’s lost touch with its own history. Thanks to some very Orwellian redacting by the sinister IT department, most of this bunker’s 10,000 inhabitants know nothing about the disaster which sent their ancestors down there in the first place.

For Hugh Howey, author of the Silo novels, it’s the perfect place to explore political questions. “The story is really about this tension of how we can live free while also being governed,” he tells me, “and the freedoms we’re willing to sacrifice in order to live in a society.”

Unlike Fallout’s horizontally sprawling bunkers, the vertical arrangement of the silo, in which the elites occupy the upper levels while the workers are housed down below, makes the power imbalance particularly stark. The show’s most iconic feature is a giant spiral staircase. (Lifts, apparently, have gone out of fashion by the 25th century.) When characters ascend to the upper levels they have to drag themselves up thousands of heavy concrete steps.

“We were inspired by Brutalist apartment blocks,” production designer Gavin Bocquet tells me. “In the early Soviet cities they were cut off from the rest of the world, but they still had restaurants and bars and things, and they didn’t really know any different.”

Initially hoping to film on location, Bocquet visited famous Brutalist buildings in London, including the National Theatre and the Barbican Centre (the latter served as the Coruscant underworld in Andor), and even an abandoned apartment block in South Africa.

“We looked at lots of sites,” he says, “but none of them was quite right. In the end we had to build it ourselves. We didn’t have a mile-high silo, but we built a 45-foot one.”

Finding a sound-stage that could accommodate such a huge set was challenging. Eventually, Bocquet settled on a former freezer-plant in Hoddesdon. “This was during the Covid lockdowns,” he recalls. “We were masked up, and testing every morning, and for about a year we were isolated in this giant dark space. I think it probably helped subliminally – we really felt like we were living underground.”

With construction on the staircase under way, author Howey was invited to the set. “He started crying,” Bocquet remembers. “He was physically walking up this thing that he had imagined years earlier.”

“It was overwhelming,” Howey tells me. “They’d built three storeys of the silo to full scale, strong enough to support hundreds of actors at a time. To go from being a solitary writer making something up in my own mind, to seeing this group of people working together to build it, was one of the most emotional experiences of my life.”

Impressive as it may be, however, the Silo set holds little appeal for the cast of Paradise, who film their own supposedly underground scenes outside on the Paramount backlot, with the California sun beating down on them.

“I will say I much prefer our bunker!” laughs Krys Marshall. “Ours is a glam bunker. Theirs looks like it’s just a hair above hell.”

Leave it to the billionaires to make surviving the apocalypse look so good.