Perfect for the end of the world! How a nuclear bunker became television’s most important property television

SAltman’s got one — although Mark Zuckerberg is apparently larger. Peter Thiel is described as “huge” and is located in New Zealand. These days, it’s a doomsday bunker (or, in Elon Musk’s case, an “apocalypse resort”). It is necessary For any self-respecting billionaire – it’s enough to make you wonder if they know something we don’t.

A slew of recent dramas suggest we’re fascinated by such impressive underground real estate. Even more daring is Paradise on Disney+, in which tech billionaire Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) finances a stunningly elaborate construction project under the imprecise codename “Versailles.” Unlike Clive Owen’s Andy Ronson in A Murder at the End of the World, saving a few carefully selected individuals isn’t enough for this boss girl and her tech bro. Instead, Redmond went further, building “the world’s largest underground city,” an all-American artificial suburb, accommodating 25,000 people while a climate catastrophe swirled overhead.

This Truman Show-style replica is so convincing — complete with robotic ducks and a giant light bulb hanging in the sky — that viewers didn’t realize where the story was taking place or what kind of show they were watching until the final moments of the pilot episode.

They weren’t the only ones who fell for the daring bait-and-switch. “I wasn’t expecting that!” laughs Kris Marshall, who plays Secret Service agent Nicole Robinson. When I read the text, I said to myself: “Page 63… Page 64… Page 65?!!!“It was a complete shock.”

Now, with Paradise returning for a second season, it does so with a more subtle twist up its sleeve. It is believed that the nuclear bombs that exploded on the topside never exploded, and the world outside the bunker proves to be more nuanced than the post-apocalyptic wasteland that the survivors below imagined.

“One of the nice things about our show is that we don’t have this completely dystopian experience of ‘the end of days is the worst of days,’” Marshall says. “We watch what happens when people feel down but don’t come out, and how their resilience keeps them alive.”

On the surface at least – no pun intended – it’s a move that puts Paradise at odds with another hugely popular game, Fallout. Based on the hit video game series, the suave corporate elite live in ultra-sterile 1950s-style bunkers, while the world above has become a “wasteland,” a horror show complete with bizarre mutant monsters and even more bizarre post-apocalyptic humans, from the mech-clad warrior monks of the Brotherhood of Steel to the Roman soldiers of Caesar’s Legion, who look as if they have wandered out of the world of the swords-and-sandals saga and straight into the dome of Mad Max. Thunderstorm.

The show’s most fascinating character is Ghoul (Walton Goggins), who straddles the apocalyptic divide, as we see him before the nuclear apocalypse — when he was Hollywood actor “Pinko” Cooper Howard — and 200 years later, as a noseless undead gunslinger who relies on drugs to keep himself from turning “monstrous.”

How much of the ghoul’s humanity remains is an open question, but even Fallout’s most obvious human survivors must come out of hiding eventually, and are inevitably changed in the process—like fairytale heroes who only find themselves after they get lost in the woods. In the wasteland, deep truths are revealed, and the wisdom passed down by a generation of Bunker-Boomers (embodied by Hank MacLean, Kyle MacLachlan’s mid-level executive) is exposed as a tissue of lies and corruption.

“There’s always a moment in these stories when the bunker turns out to be built on deception,” says David Pike, author of After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Fantasies. “It’s an illusion, and it doesn’t even give us what it promised. I wonder if that’s partly a result of experiencing the pandemic, and realizing how miserable sheltering in reality is.”

Pike traces the current wave of bunker novels to Ayn ​​Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which depicts an elite compound in the Colorado mountains—the same setting chosen for the Palace of Versailles in Paradise. “These fairy tales about billionaires building luxury bunkers and bringing in a carefully curated collection are right-wing fantasies,” Pike says. “Everyone outside the bunker turns into some kind of new barbarians, they’re these mobs that will do terrible things if we let them in. It’s the same vision of the world that most of the Global North now has in terms of borders.”

However, in these shows, the deadliest threat always comes along inside The hideout – sometimes even from within the ‘nuclear’ family at its heart. Fallout’s Hank McClane, who turns out to have set off the atomic bomb himself, is the father of the series’ optimistic heroine, Lucy. The most terrifying figure in Paradise is not a monstrous inhabitant of the post-apocalyptic world above, but Redmond, the ruthless billionaire behind the bunker project. With the help of her sociopathic pet Jane, played chillingly by Nicole Brydon Bloom, Redmond plots and kills her way through heaven as a subterranean Frank Underwood.

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

Set in the very near future, Paradise feels contemporary, and not just because of its climate-conscious message. One of the main plot points in the first season centered on who was playing on Nintendo’s game console. Fallout, despite its 1950s aesthetic, is unusually sci-fi – set, for the most part, a good quarter-millennium into the future.

Meanwhile, Apple TV’s Silo explores a community that has been barricaded for so long that it has lost touch with its history. Thanks to some Orwellian tinkering by an evil IT department, most of this bunker’s 10,000 residents know nothing about the disaster that sent their ancestors there in the first place.

For Hugh Howey, author of the Silo novels, it is the perfect place to explore political questions. “The story is really about this tension of how to live free while also being governed, and the freedoms that we are willing to sacrifice in order to live in a community,” Lee said.

Unlike the sprawling bunkers in Fallout, the silo’s vertical arrangement, with elites occupying the upper levels while workers are housed below, makes the power imbalance particularly stark. The most famous feature of the show is the giant spiral staircase. (Elevators were clearly out of fashion by the 25th century.) When the characters ascend to the upper levels, they must drag themselves up thousands of heavy concrete steps.

“We took inspiration from brutalist apartment buildings,” production designer Gavin Bouquet tells me. “In the early Soviet cities, they were isolated from the rest of the world, but they still had restaurants and bars and things, and they didn’t really know anything different.”

Initially, Bouquet hoped to shoot on location, visiting London’s famous Brutalist buildings, including the National Theater, the Barbican Center (the latter served as Coruscant’s underworld on Andor), and even an abandoned apartment building in South Africa.

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

Finding a soundstage that could accommodate such a huge ensemble was difficult. Eventually, Bouquet settled in a former freezing plant in Hoddesdon. “This was during the Covid lockdowns,” he recalls. “We were masked, taking tests every morning, and for about a year we were isolated in this giant dark space. I think that probably helped us subconsciously – we really felt like we were living underground.”

As construction work on the staircase began, author Howey was invited to the set. “He started crying,” Bouquet recalls. “He was physically walking into this thing that he had been imagining years before.”

“It was overwhelming,” Howie told me. “They built a three-story silo on a massive scale, strong enough to support hundreds of actors at a time. Going from being a solo writer creating something in my mind, to seeing this group of people working together to build it, was one of the most emotional experiences of my life.”

However impressive it may be, the Silo set holds little appeal for the Paradise actors, who are filming their supposedly underground scenes outside on the Paramount backlot, where the California sun beats down on them.

“I’ll say I much prefer our hideout!” Chris Marshall laughs. “Ours is a wizard’s lair. Theirs seems to be just a hair above hell.”

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