Alongside all the mutant mayhem, the terrifying monster brawls, and the ‘just one more hour’ gameplay, the Fallout games have always come with a hefty dollop of satire – whether it’s the winking aesthetic steeped in ’50s Americana, or the pointed notion of what exactly goes down inside Vault-Tec’s underground shelters. And while the upcoming Fallout streaming series – created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with extra producing power from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy – isn’t necessarily going to be a straight adaptation of the games (choose-your-own-path RPGs aren’t necessarily built for that), it’s going to retain not just the monsters and the mutations, but that streak of dark humour too.
The show, Nolan tells Empire in the Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire issue, is about “what happens when you outsource the survival of the human race.” And it follows in a long line of TV shows that used their own particular contexts to comment on the worries of the day. For us, that’s… well, total annihilation. “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?’” Gulp.
The series is set to follow three predominant threads to explore Fallout’s irradiated world – one as Ella Purnell’s Lucy (seen in the exclusive image above) leaves the confines of her vault to go above ground; one following Aaron Moten’s Maximus, a member of metal warriors the Brotherhood Of Steel surviving in the scorched Earth; and Walton Goggins’ noseless former cowboy simply known as ‘The Ghoul’. All three of them are looking for the same thing. “We talked a lot about The Good, The Bad And The Ugly,” says Wagner. “That’s three characters in search of a box of gold, so we asked ourselves, ‘What’s the gold in this world?’” Tune in for the answer. Anyone got a Pip-Boy handy?
Read Empire’s full story on Fallout in the March 2023 issue, on sale Thursday 18 January. Fallout streams on Prime Video from 12 April.