[COLUMN] Why Are There So Many Shows About Apocalyptic Bunkers Right Now? | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the end of the first episode of Paradise, but it’s really just the premise of the show.

Paradise premiered on Hulu this week. On the surface, it is a fairly standard streaming event series, an eight-episode blend of trashy and prestige television starring Sterling K. Brown as Secret Service Agent Xavier Collins, who finds himself investigating the mysterious death of former President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) in the very planned community of Paradise. Naturally, there’s a big twist at the end of the first episode: the world has ended, and Paradise is a bunker housing the survivors.

Just nine days before the premiere of Paradise, Silo wrapped up its second season on Apple TV+. Adapted from a series of novels by Hugh Howey, Silo is set within another post-apocalyptic bunker and follows another conspiracy unfolding at the end of the world. Disney and Apple are not the only streaming services with a bunker show. Fallout was reportedly one of Amazon Prime’s biggest hits last year, another adaptation about another set of post-apocalyptic bunkers.

It seems to be something of a trend. Hulu’s mystery show Murder at the End of the World was set in a bunker owned by a reclusive billionaire (Clive Owen) to survive the apocalypse. Although a train rather than a bunker, similar anxieties ran through TNT’s television adaptation of Snowpiercer, which wrapped its fourth and final season last year. It is also worth noting that writer Armando Iannucci and actor Steve Coogan are taking a stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove on tour.

What’s really interesting about this trend is that these are very different shows aimed at very different demographics. Paradise is a polished middle-brow thriller from Dan Fogelman, the creator behind populist smash This is Us. In contrast, Silo is a more cerebral and sophisticated effort; it stars Rebecca Ferguson, David Oyelowo and Tim Robbins. In contrast, Fallout is a live action cartoon of a show, a satire painted with the broadest of brushes. The three shows are distinct in tone.

Of course, these shows exist as a sub-strand of a larger resurgence in apocalyptic pop culture. The Last of Us has been one of HBO’s biggest hits of the past few years, and returns for a second season later this year. Station Eleven was a somewhat smaller show about the process of trying to revive art and culture to the end of the world. Foundation is an epic about preparing to ride out the apocalypse, in the hope that something might arise from the ashes. There is something in the air.

This makes sense. Just last week, the Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds to midnight, indicating that humanity is closer to extinction than ever before. The world just endured a massive global pandemic that left at least seven million people dead, with the possibility of a mutated bird flu looming on the horizon. Apocalyptic wildfires consume Los Angeles. The oceans are rising. Artificial intelligence may be an existential threat. Oh, and “mirror bacteria” could destroy life on Earth.

It is also a time of incredible political and social turmoil. Russia and Ukraine are locked in the largest land war in Europe since the end of the Second World War, making nuclear war seem more likely. The American government paused all federal grants, halting school meals and cancer trials. Billionaire Elon Musk has been given control of the government payment system. American tariffs on Canada have led to the possibility of Canada cutting off its energy supply to its southern neighbor.

There is a general and pervasive sense of doom in the air, to the point that phrases like “doomscrolling” and “doomerism” have entered the popular lexicon to capture the general vibe of the moment. Coupled with a wave of viral news stories in publications like The Guardian, The Atlantic, Vice and even The Hollywood Reporter, it makes sense that popular culture would be drawn to the idea of an isolated underground community weathering the apocalypse.

Just as the alien invasion movies and the nuclear apocalypse stories of the 1950s spoke to that era’s sublimated anxieties over communist infiltration or mutually assured destruction, these stories resonate with more contemporary concerns. Obviously, these shows express a very literal fear of the end of the world and the belief that the existing wealthy and powerful have already created spaces where they can hunker down and weather the storm as most of the population dies.

Paradise barely conceals its contemporary framework. Bradford is transparently a stand-in for the current occupant of the Oval Office; he even met Collins at the start of his second term. Bradford “went from being one of the richest men in the world to a one-term – now two-term – president” who “couldn't tell you who the eighth vice president of the United States was” and who is “not really sure where Syria is on a map.” He even, to quote his wife (Cassidy Freeman), “loved an outdated stereotype” – or, as Collins more bluntly frames it, was “racist.”

There is a sense in which the metaphor underpinning these shows speaks for itself, particularly in an era where billionaires like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos scramble towards space with the same energy as Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) trying to get on board a lifeboat in Titanic. There is a prevailing sense that there are people rich and powerful enough to buy their way out of the end of the world, which speaks to underlying energy of contemporary shows about late capitalism like Squid Game.

However, the bunker setting also serves as a framework for more contemporary metaphors that resonate even beyond the looming threat of the end of the world. These bunkers often serve as petri dishes, microcosms of larger society. Indeed, this is literally the case in Fallout, where each of the vaults was used as the site of a particular experiment. More broadly, these bunkers replicate the hierarchies of modern society in miniature.

There is a decidedly conspiratorial bent to these shows. In each of these shows, the bunker has a clear internal mythology that the viewer gradually comes to question and doubt. The protagonists begin with an assumption about how their small and contained world works, only to realize that this is in fact a lie. The bunker is often a shallow facsimile of the world as the characters understand it. It is Plato’s Cave. Fallout takes this idea to its extreme, projecting cornfields on the wall.

In Paradise, it quickly becomes clear that President Cal Bradford and his successor President Henry Baines (Matt Malloy) are just figureheads. The underground community is really managed by Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), the architect of the community who goes by the codename "Sinatra." It is also revealed the community was carefully vetted and approved by her psychotherapist Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi).

The community in Paradise is built on a lie. Redmond briefs the wealthy elite members of the community before Baines addresses the rest of the survivors. Bradford’s murder is framed as an accident to maintain order within the utopian community. As hard as Redmond and Torabi have worked to create a fantasy version of the American ideal, it is fake. Even the ducks in the duck pond are props, changed out to offer the illusion of suburban stability.

This theme runs through the other bunker shows. In Fallout, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) discovers that everything her father (Kyle MacLachlan) taught her was a lie, and that he was complicit in true horrific atrocities. Silo is built upon a series of twists and misdirections, to the point that the first season finale hinges on a double bluff, the shocking twist that what the characters believed to be true in the premiere, then came to doubt over the course of the season, is actually true.

These themes tap into the palpable anxiety simmering through contemporary pop culture about the state of modern America, in particular the growing skepticism concerning the beliefs that underpin American exceptionalism: that social mobility is possible, that hard work will be rewarded, that democracy works. By reducing the entirety of society to a few people trapped in a confined space effectively constructing a cargo cult of governance, the bunker shows all explore these fears.

However, there might also be something more subtle at work. It seems notable that these shows emerged in the wake of a massive global pandemic and public lockdowns. The pandemic is largely absent from popular culture, to the point that a show like Doctor Who directly acknowledging it feels exceptional. More often than not, the pandemic haunts narratives like Teacup, Asteroid City and even Oppenheimer, stories about isolated social bubbles and even marriages under pressure.

These bunkers are all, in a very literal sense, locked down. These are isolated communities of people forced to effectively quarantine together. Both Fallout and Silo are about the question of what lies outside the bunkers. In Paradise, there is a sense that the community has yet to recover from the shock of having to approximate normal life after mass death and destruction. “You actually think everyone's past all the trauma?” Collins asks Torabi. Torabi replies, “God, no. No.” Indeed, Torabi is explicitly “an expert in grief.”

In each of these bunker shows, tied to that conspiratorial subtext, there is a strong emphasis on the notion of denial. Characters are all struggling with grief as something resembling a normal life goes on around them. Collins mourns his wife, who did not make it to the shelter in time. Redmond was in part inspired to build the shelter following the death of her son Dylan (Peter Gorbis), due to a random medical ailment. Even the show’s title and premise evokes the memento mori, “et in arcadia, ego.” Even in Paradise, Death.

It's interesting that this idea of the post-apocalyptic bunker is so densely woven into the fabric of contemporary pop culture. It speaks to something stirring in the collective subconscious, buried not too deep beneath the surface.