Shows to Watch If You Loved Silo

Silo's nearest relation is on the same service. Lumon Industries splits the memories of the staff on its severed floor in two, so the self at work never learns a thing about the self who goes home, and the company runs on the silo's machinery: a founder whose sayings are treated as scripture, departments kept apart and dissent handled in the break room, where one new recruit reads a formal apology more than a thousand times before her manager accepts that she means it. Where Silo is earnest, this is bleak, corporate and very funny.

Seven years after an attempt to cool the planet froze it solid, the last of humanity circles the globe on a train 1,001 carriages long, with the rich at the front and stowaways crammed into the Tail. It is louder and soapier than Silo, its first season takes a while to find its nerve, and its four seasons reach an ending built to serve as one. What makes it worth the ride for a Silo fan is Andre Layton, a Tail passenger hauled forward because he was a homicide detective before the freeze and there has been a murder. The case becomes his licence to walk through every class of the train, the way the sheriff's badge sends Juliette up and down the silo's stairs.

In the first episode of this political thriller, the head of the president's security detail finds the president dead at home, and that turns out to be the least surprising thing the hour has to offer. Sterling K. Brown plays the agent, whose investigation keeps showing him how much of his own world was arranged for him, and Dan Fogelman, who made This Is Us, makes sure the grief lands as hard as the conspiracy. Two seasons are out and Fogelman planned three, the last of which has finished filming. Go in knowing nothing else.

Lucy MacLean has grown up in Vault 33 trusting its rules as sincerely as anyone in the silo trusts the Pact, and Amazon's adaptation of the video games sends her up into what is left of Los Angeles, 219 years after the bombs, to find her kidnapped father. Silo rations its glimpses of the outside; Fallout spends most of its time out there, and its wasteland is far bloodier and much funnier than anything Silo would attempt. Walton Goggins, as a cowboy film star first seen doing tricks at a children's birthday party as the bombs fall, nearly steals it. You don't need to have played the games.

Do not discuss your life before. Always answer the phone if it rings. Do not try to leave. Those are the house rules of Wayward Pines, Idaho, a picture-postcard town where Matt Dillon's Secret Service agent wakes after a car crash, having come looking for two missing colleagues, and soon finds he can neither phone out nor leave. This Fox mystery from Blake Crouch's novels is a silo with lawns, and its first season's ten episodes tell a complete story and land it. Season two arrived with a new showrunner and a largely new cast, and is easy to skip.

J. K. Simmons plays a junior clerk at a United Nations agency in Berlin who has spent decades swapping coded phrases across a table without ever being told what the job is for. The answer turns up in the shape of a far harder man: himself, from a parallel Earth. Starz cancelled this spy thriller after two seasons, though the second finale works as an ending while leaving a wider future open. Watching Simmons size himself up is reason enough to start; for a Silo fan the deeper pleasure is a bureaucracy built entirely on need-to-know.

Every twenty-year-old in the crumbling Inland gets one go at the Process, a run of cruel tests that decides who may join the comfortable Offshore, and only 3% pass. For a Silo fan the draw is the excuse: a class divide dressed up as merit, overseen by an official who changes the tests on the fly. Netflix's first Portuguese-language original, it ran for four seasons and finished.

Harold Perrineau holds this one together with his teeth, as the self-appointed sheriff of a small American town that nobody who drives in can drive out of. After dark, things that look human until they smile come out of the woods, and the first rule is to be behind a talisman before nightfall. It is the horror version of Silo's trapped community, rules first and explanations withheld, and four seasons in, the answers are still a fifth and final season away.

A passenger jet breaks up over a remote island, and the survivors find the place is not as deserted as it looks. It is a big commitment, 121 episodes across six seasons with a finale that still divides the people who stuck with it, but somewhere beneath the jungle it puts the question Silo keeps asking at its barest: do you obey an instruction you can't check?

Two cities share the same streets in this four-part BBC Two adaptation of China Miéville's novel, and their citizens are trained to unsee each other, because crossing without permission brings down a shadowy power called Breach. David Morrissey's detective is handed the case of a student found dead in one city with ties to the other, and a society organised around not looking turns out to be the silo's banned relics taken to their logical end.

In this German mystery, children start vanishing from the small town of Winden in 2019, and the search runs into the caves beneath the nuclear power plant, past a door marked 'Sic mundus creatus est'. If Silo turned you into someone who reads the Pact for loopholes, Dark will have you drawing family trees for four households. It ran three seasons and lands the ending it planned. Watch it in German, with a notebook.

An engineer at a Silicon Valley quantum computing company goes looking for answers after her boyfriend dies at the end of his first day in its most secretive division, a team that works inside a floating, gold-lined cube on a campus watched over by a giant statue of a little girl. The company's boss keeps the project's purpose from everyone outside that cube, which will feel familiar to anyone who watched Bernard ration the truth. Alex Garland wrote and directed all eight slow, beautiful, very self-assured episodes, and the moment the cube's purpose comes into focus is the one I'd watch it for.