Fallout TV Series Gets New Look; Creator Talks About Social Commentary

Fallout is just a couple of months away and the marketing for the show is starting to ramp up. Bethesda Games Studio is one of the most revered video game studios out there and while they’ve made great games for decades, they started to become a household name with Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the late-2000s. Bethesda would continue to cement itself as one of the great western RPG developers with future Fallout games and it has been very protective over the franchise, doing its best to make sure it remains relevant but doesn’t get overdone. After years of fans hoping to see a Fallout movie or TV series, it’s finally happening courtesy of Amazon Prime and The Dark Knight trilogy co-writer Jonathan Nolan.

We got our first look at the trailer for Fallout back in December and it looks like it will be incredibly faithful to the tone/aesthetic of the games while expanding upon that world in big, dramatic ways. We’ll also get to see the bombs drop from a new perspective as the trailer showcases Los Angeles getting devastated by a nuclear bomb. Fallout 4 gave fans their first glimpse at a pre-nuke world in Boston, but it was very brief. The Fallout TV series looks like it will cover this universe from multiple angles and it will also take the opportunity to examine our current world through a fictional one. Given Fallout is all about the consequences of a war that led to humanity become near-extinct, it makes sense to inject some social commentary into the TV series. Speaking with Empire, Jonathan Nolan explained that Fallout is about “what happens when you outsource the survival of the human race.” We also got a new look at the show via a new picture of Ella Purnell’s character, Lucy.

“Just as M*A*S*H gets to talk about Vietnam through the lens of the Korean War,” says Nolan, “we get to talk about the mess we’re in now through the lens of… ‘What if everybody just gets on with it and destroys the fucking world?’” 

Fallout is set to premiere on Prime Video on April 12th. It will be canonical to the games, but you don’t need to have played the games to follow along. The franchise is typically pretty disconnected from each games’ story, so you won’t need to play any kind of catch up to watch the series.