Falling for Fallout

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It’s either a testament to the showrunner’s art or the flabbiness of contemporary American creativity that two of the most exciting small-screen streaming series in recent memory were born out of video games. In this case, I’m going to go with the former.

First there was The Last of Us, based on the 2020 post-apocalyptic action-adventure roleplaying game of the same name and premiering as a series starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay on HBO in 2023. Now there is Fallout on Amazon Prime, which is accomplishing something vanishingly rare in the world of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and adaptations: pleasing its longtime fans. And they are legion.

For those who are unaware, the Fallout franchise is generally regarded as a pioneering, best-in-class example of both the genre and style of game depicting the survival of a hard-bitten hero pitted against a world shattered by war, disease or any other variety of armageddon.

The original Fallout hit the scene in 1997, introducing players to the post-nuclear wasteland of the late 21st century — dotted with shanty towns full of desperate radiated drifters, mutant animals roaming the blasted deserts and vaults buried beneath the surface populated by a generation of humans who’ve never seen the sun.

In the divergent universe of Fallout, the bombs fell in 2077 amid a global conflict that saw China invade Alaska and the U.S. annex Canada in a struggle over resources. While the wealthy and well-connected were able to escape into the vaults to weather the end-times in a culture frozen forever in a kind of latter-day Cold War Americana, the remnants of humanity devolved and evolved in various ways — into quasi-zombies called ghouls, Mad Max-style dieselpunk raiders, cannibalistic drifters, religio-fascist “knights” of a techno-fueled brotherhood and everything in between.

In the original game — and now the streaming series — the protagonist is a “vault dweller” who must leave the safety of their subterranean home to fulfill a critical mission. 

In the 1997 Fallout it’s to find a computer chip that will keep Vault 13’s water system functioning. In the show — set in the year 2296 — our hero is Lucy McLean (Ella Purnell), who must recover a piece of high technology implanted in the head of a scientist and deliver it to a mysterious political leader named Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury). Lucy must do this in order to save her father, the “overseer” of Vault 33 (played by Kyle MacLachlan) who has been kidnapped after a raid. 

Along the way, she learns about the horrors of the surface while making new friends like Maximus — a squire masquerading as a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel (Aaron Moten) — and enemies like The Ghoul, a.k.a. Cooper Howard, who had once been a star of the silver screen but transformed into a radioactive bounty hunter who has wandered the poisoned earth for more than 200 years, kept alive by some kind of serum (and played with series-stealing complexity by Walton Goggins).

Drawing on 22 installments, expansions and variants of the video game published from 1997 to 2018, there is a Yucca Mountain-worth of lore to draw from in the Fallout streaming series, which it delivers with astonishing depth.

From the incongruous mid-century-style easy listening soundtrack to the irradiated culture of the 23rd century — where Nuka Cola caps are money — creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are clearly committed fans of the world built by the franchise over the course of its almost three decades. 

Gorgeous to look at (seriously, every scene and set piece is meticulously tailored to fit with the Fallout aesthetic) and superbly paced and performed by writers and actors alike, the essential charm of Fallout is in its genuinely cutting satire of American exceptionalism. Brimming with gallows humor, the dark heart of both the game and the series is the essential hollowness of the tech-obsessed, consumerist-driven wasteland of the mind, body and soul that preceded the fictional apocalypse, and is currently precipitating the real-life one we’ll probably live to experience.

Put simply, Fallout the show is a more-than-worthy successor to the iconic, groundbreaking game at its core and a streaming series for our time. Watch all eight episodes of the first season on Amazon Prime.