The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Podcast takes a look back at the year in television, as Stefan and I review my picks for the ten best shows of 2023. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

BLAH takes a look at Silo, 2023’s most no-nonsense sci-fi show, in the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Conversation, now available for our Patreon subscribers!

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or Empire, The Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

I can’t remember the last time a show had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way “Outside,” the finale of Silo’s crackerjack first season, did. Actually, no, that’s not strictly true. I can’t remember the last time a show that wasn’t professional wrestling had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way this episode did. Silo is the most purely entertaining drama of the year, and these drum-tight 40-odd minutes demonstrate why.

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider. What a fun show!

Let’s first focus on the man who appeared to be the show’s big bad before Bernard revealed his true nature: Sims, the Judicial commandant played by Common. Actually, Sims is just “Rob” to his friends and family, who from his boss Bernard to his wife Camille (Alexandria Wiley) appear to view him with legitimate love and respect. Of course, Bernard’s willing to look past all that when he reprimands Rob for sending unauthorized guards to escort Camille and their son to his apartment, but be that as it may: The point is that this jackbooted thug is just some guy, a guy with a wife and a kid and a tiny apartment and dreams beyond his station. Kind of like literally everyone else in the Silo, in other words.

It’s up to Common to pull off this contrast, and he does so using the same tools that make him intimidating. Take his black-leather-jacket-and-turtleneck wardrobe, for example. On one hand, it’s secret-police chic. On the other, the cut and styling are reminiscent of the 1970s-indebted clothing often worn by musicians who emerged from the same conscious-rap/neo-soul circles Common himself did as a hip-hop artist back in the day. Scary but sexy, that’s our Sims.

Common’s made two separate careers out of using his voice, and that helps him here too. Like George Clooney, he’s blessed with pipes that make him sound handsome as well as look it, and that mellifluous baritone makes him an attractive figure as well as a convincingly caring parent and spouse. But any guy who can speak that softly and still sound that commanding is a perfect villain from an aural perspective, and that’s a big part of what makes him believable as a guy who will stop at nothing to acquire his target, runaway Sheriff Juliette Nichols.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Silo season one for Decider.

The best way I can describe Silo is this: Imagine you’re a baseball player and your thing is that you’re a monster home run hitter, like pitchers are afraid of you, you get intentionally walked a lot, when you take the field they play “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. You are one home run away from breaking the record. And for some reason, the league has given you a choice: You can take your chances with the best relief pitcher in the game…or you can simply set a tee on home plate, put a ball on it, and knock it out of the park, easy-peasy lemon squeezey.

Silo is a show that always chooses the latter option. It’s not here to impress you with its high degree of difficulty. Why would it, when it’s so much easier to keep things simple and just deliver on what you set out to do, over and over and over?

I reviewed last week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

Ah, the simple pleasures of Silo. It’s a show I look forward to watching and writing about every week, because it’s a show that, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, knows what it wants and knows how to get it. Its aim is to explore a central mystery — who’s keeping everyone inside this Silo and why — and it does that. Its technique is to use the fundamental building blocks of suspense filmmaking — cat and mouse games, races against the clock, a drip-drip-drip of clues — and it does so with skill and panache. If this sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, then I’m misspeaking, because it really is a formidable achievement. Lots and lots and lots of science fiction shows try and fail to achieve what Silo makes look easy.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

“What if everything you know to be true, everything you’ve been told by the people you love, was in fact just one big lie?” Good question, George Wilkins! And the beauty of it is that like so much of Silo, it has a double meaning. The surface one, the obvious one, is your bog-standard dystopian Everything You Thought You Knew Was Wrong boilerplate, a rebel telling the woman he loves why he’s rebelling, because he believes the Silo is built on bullshit. 

The other meaning — the more insidious one for said woman, Juliette Nichols — is that she’s not the woman he loves, because he doesn’t really love her at all. At least according to his ex-girlfriend Regina Jackson (Sonita Henry), George is, or was, a serial user of people, women in particular, who could get him closer to the only thing he really does care about: the forbidden history of the Silo and the world that surrounds it. 

Don’t worry, I’m not bragging about sussing out this dual interpretation. The show is not subtle about all this. Nor does it need to be. Silo, as I’ve said before, is a simple show rather than a simplistic one. It has one big central mystery — loosely, “What’s the deal with the Silo?” — as its core support pillar, and wraps everything else around that, from sub-mysteries to world-building to character development — around that pillar like the spiral stairs at the center of the Silo itself. 

I reviewed this past weekend’s episode of Silo for Decider.

Tim Robbins is here to remind you he’s a movie star. Not through anything flashy or theatrical, mind you — just through his ability to play the most mild-mannered character on this show and still come across as the most fascinating and charismatic guy in any room he’s in.

As played by Robbins, Bernard, the new mayor of the titular Silo, is an interesting cat. From what we’ve seen from him so far, he displays both the gentle arrogance of an expert in his field (IT) and the quietude of someone unused to relating to other people in a personal way, which is another form of arrogance I suppose. His gestures at camaraderie are simultaneously ineffective and endearing: his corny joke at Mayor Jahns’s funeral about filling her very big shoes, but not literally, since her feet were actually small (you can all but see his mental note: “Pause for laughter”); his offering of a drink to the Silo’s other officials, then his silent “okay, more for me then” affect as he consolidates the glasses he’s already poured and takes a swig. 

I reviewed episode five of Silo for Decider.

Setting a show in world this insular and claustrophobic requires an attention to fine detail when working with the characters who inhabit it. True, it’s the kind of genre storytelling painted with very broad strokes, so I’m not expecting these people to suddenly become the cast of The Sopranos or Mad Men or Halt and Catch Fire. But what writer Rémi Aubuchon (PSA: The writers of the WGA deserve fair treatment and fair pay from the enormous corporations that profit off their labor), director David Semel, and actors Amelie Child-Villiers and Iain Glen achieve here is extraordinary nonetheless. You can feel how real the crack-up between them is — stemming from their exhaustion and frustration at the end of their respective days, triggered by the sudden clangor of the alarm and the threat of the smoke, built up over time as Juliette grew to resent her father for keeping her at a distance and her father grew to resent himself for doing so as well.

Thanks to Child-Villiers you can hear the absolute misery in Juliette’s voice as she runs from the room, blocked by Semel so that her back is turned to both her father and the camera as she mourns for the childhood she’s losing and blames him for the loss. Glen (very convincingly de-aged by makeup, a wig, and I’d imagine a little bit of digital sleight-of-hand) holds back just long enough before delivering the doctor’s retort to convey the fact that this is a failure of self-control for him; he knows he should not play tit for tat with his grieving daughter, but his pain is such that he can’t stop himself from venting it. 

Taken in totality, this scene gives what could be a rote partial-orphan origin story for Juliette (genre fiction absolutely loves killing off its protagonists’ mothers) and makes it something raw and lived-in. This in turn makes the Silo feel less like something from a YA novel you read and forget about and more like a real place, with real people in it. It’s an achievement.

I reviewed today’s episode of Silo for Decider.

What follows plays out like a class demonstration in how to execute a thriller sequence. The mission? Simple: Shut down the generator, fix it, and start it back up. The risks? The steam could blow, the repairs could fail, the workers could die. The stakes? The future of the Silo. That’s all you need to know to enjoy the white-knuckle stuff that follows. Keep it simple, stupid.

What’s more, every individual step within that simple plan is described, depicted, and executed with clarity and verve. The show establishes the major players — Juliette, her boss Knox (Shane McRae), her apprentice Cooper (Matt Gomez Hidaka), and her colleague Shirley (Remmie Milner) — and gives them all easily understood jobs to do — Juliette IDs the problem and then descends into the steam hatch room to cool it down with a fire hose; Cooper reinstalls the repaired rotor blade he and Juliette remove; Shirley monitors the situation in the steam room; Knox watches over the whole thing, communicating messages from one person to the next.

It’s easy to understand where everyone is in relationship to one another in the space of the big machinery chamber. It’s easy to understand the kind of damage they’ll incur if things go wrong — from a fall, from getting hit by machinery, from drowning, from burning. It’s easy to understand how much time they have left, and to feel the tension mount along with them as that time ticks away faster than they’d anticipated. And finally, it’s easy to feel the same relief and triumph they do when they pull it all off just in the nick of time. 

Meanwhile, the recognizable, analog, industrial nature of all the machinery — it’s all blades and bolts and pipes and valves and big steel plates — only helps us intuit exactly what could go wrong and how bad going wrong would be. This goes double or triple for Juliette, whose fear of drowning (presumably that’s how her mom and/or brother died) has already been established; Rebecca Ferguson’s guttural shrieks of terror as the water rises around her in the steam hatch chamber are convincing and effective.

Seriously, from top to bottom, it’s crackerjack genre filmmaking. It’s also a marked contrast from the main-character switcheroos that characterized the first two episodes. This one’s based on action, and the action is damn good.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

I like a mystery box show that isn’t in a big rush to show off how mysterious the box is. Shotgunning holy shit, what’s going on, everything we thought we knew was wrong moments at the viewer is seen as a shortcut to intrigue, a way to get people hooked early and hooked hard. More often than not, though, it obscures whatever other ideas the show may have about itself, its characters, its world, its worldview. I already know something mysterious is going on; I don’t need to be frogmarched past hidden door after hidden door and treasure chest after treasure chest and hidden connection after hidden connection just for my interest to be held. Like, what’s the hurry? You got a hot date or something, mystery box show?

So kudos to the second episode of Silo (“Holston’s Pick”) for playing things out with focus and restraint. Instead of going all 1899 on us and flipping everything upside-down just as we’re getting the lay of the land, it simply burrows deeper into the mysteries we’re already familiar with.

I reviewed the second episode of Silo for Decider.

I’ll say this right up front: Silo will not wow you. This is not a big, bold, bizarre, frightening science-fiction vision in the vein of Netflix’s marvelous Dark or HBO Max’s late, lamented Raised by Wolves. It’s more in the vein of Apple+’s own Foundation: adapted from a series of novels, given a decent budget and a solid cast, and aimed right down the middle at the kinds of folks who like to open up streaming apps and watch science fiction shows. There are a lot of people like that, and so there have been a lot of shows like that too. Which is fine.

I’m covering Silo for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.