Weekend’s best TV: Silo buries viewers deep inside a grim dystopia, while Black Ops delivers big, silly laughs

AFTER the two opening episodes of new dystopian drama Silo (Apple TV+), you may find yourself yearning for the wide open post-apocalyptic spaces of The Last of Us.

It might be crawling with the infected out there, but at least there’s a bit of fresh air and sunshine to be had. Silo, based on a series of science fiction novels by Hugh Howey, offers so such compensations to its suffering characters. Or to its viewers.

The relentlessly grim, gloomy setting, realised at enormous cost and with extensive CGI, is painted from a pallet of drab browns and greys. It’s a vision of a claustrophobic subterranean hell on – or more accurately, under – Earth.

At an unspecified time in the future, the last remnants of the human race, about 10,000 of them, live in the enormous titular cylinder, which extends 140 storeys into the ground.

Curiously, they’re mostly Americans, like Tim Robbins and Will Patton, or Brits pretending to be Americans, like David Oyelowo, Harriet Walter and Geraldine James.

There’s a lone Swede, Rebecca Ferguson, who’s one of the executive producers as well as the lead, also playing an American.

Their only view of the outside world, which they’ve been told is toxic and unliveable, comes from an exterior camera relaying an image to window-like video screens.

The job of cleaning the grime from the camera so everyone can have a crystal-clear view of how horrible it is out there falls to those unfortunate citizens who break the laws and are expelled from the silo, or who express a desire to leave, believing they’re being lied to in order to keep them subjugated.

All someone has to do is say they want out, and they’re out. There’s no changing their minds or taking it back. Every one of the them tries to make it over a nearby hill, and every one of them dies within minutes from breathing in all that poisonous air.

And there are plenty of laws to break inside the silo. Laws about who can and can’t have babies. Laws about having forbidden “relics” – things from the days before whatever it was that screwed up the world.

It seems nobody knows what the cataclysmic event was or who built the place they call home. Said relics can be anything from a Pez sweet dispenser or a camcorder to a hard drive potentially containing explosive information about the origin of the silo and what its authoritarian rulers are really up to.

It’s this last object that upends the life of one of the men charged with upholding the law, Sheriff Holston (Oyelowo). Holston’s wife Allison (Rashida Jones) comes into contact with a hacker in possession of the hard drive, starts asking dangerously awkward questions and becomes convinced the outside word is safe. There’s only one way to find out, though.

Allison leaves the silo and meets a predictable fate. Holston eventually follows her and also dies.

His death is what triggers Silo’s main plot, which kicks in two years later and focuses on engineer Juliette (Ferguson), who works at the bottom level of the structure, literally and in terms of the societal hierarchy,

The hacker happened to be her boyfriend (relationships are also strictly policed in this world) and when he’s murdered, she begins to dig for the truth about the silo.

There’s clearly going to be a lot of dense mysteries to unlock in Silo. But after the striking first episode, the going is heavy, the enclosed setting as oppressive to look at as it is to live in.

You might be inclined to look for the exit door before the remaining eight weekly episodes are up.

One that looks well worth sticking with, on the other hand, is new half-hour cop comedyBlack Ops (BBC1, Friday). Stars and co-writers Gbemisola Ikumelo and Hammed Animashaun play black Community Support Officers Dom and Kay, who are recruited, out of sheer desperation, to go undercover and infiltrate a gang.

She’s smart but has had the ambition knocked out of her. He’s daft and guileless. It manages to wring big, silly laughs from the unlikely subjects of racism and drug-dealing and delivers, at the end of the first episode, a right whopper of a twist.