Apocalypse bunkers are back in style like it’s the late 1960s. If he can’t get to Mars in time, Elon Musk has hedged his bets with designs for a “cyberbunker” prototype and has referred to his personal plans for an “apocalypse resort.” Other tech bros like Mark Zuckerberg have reportedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars building underground homes with their own water and food supplies.
Pop culture has a lot to say about underground apocalyptic fantasies. Spoiler alert: They’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Three of the most popular television shows streaming right now take place in or around bunkers built to safeguard a tiny sliver of the world’s population from civilizational collapse.
Paradise (created by Dan Fogelman, streaming on Hulu) imagines an idyllic suburban town replete with a cozy main street and central green space. Everyone lives in comfortable middle-class homes decorated in Pottery Barn neutrals. The ducks might be mechanical, and the cheese fries are actually smothered in a vegan cheese substitute, but these are small prices to pay to live among the presumed last 25,000 people on earth, hundreds of feet under the Colorado mountains.
