Fallout [tv]
Entry updated 13 October 2025. Tagged: TV.
US tv series (2024- ). Kilter Films, Big Indie Pictures, Bethesda Game Studios, Amazon MGM Studios. Created and partly written by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, based on the Videogame series Fallout (1997). Producers include Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. Various writers and directors. Cast includes Moisés Arias, Sarita Choudhury, Walter Goggins, Kyle MacLachlan, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Aaron Moten, Johnny Pemberton, Ella Purnell and Leslie Uggams. Season 1 has 8 episodes of 45-74 minutes; at least two further series are to follow. Colour.
2296, 200 years after the Great War of 2077 between the USA and China, in which a nuclear exchange has reduced the surface of Earth to a Post-Holocaust wasteland. The inhabitants of Underground vaults work towards the restoration of society, not knowing that they were set up as experiments by the hugely powerful company VaultTec around the time of the war. Vault 33 is raided by surface dwellers, and its leader Hank MacLean (MacLachlan) is kidnapped. His daughter Lucy (Purnell) sets out on a quest to rescue him. Along the way she meets various surface dwellers, including Maximus (Moten), a member of The Brotherhood of Steel, an armed force who collect and preserve pre-war technology, but who seem uninterested in other survivors; and former film star Cooper Howard (Goggins), an undead "Ghoul" who works as a bounty hunter. Each of them is looking to transport the head of a former vault worker to a notorious clan leader, as it contains secrets undisclosed until the end of Season 1, turning out to be the formula for "cold fusion".
In the quest tradition, each character discovers or discloses information which alters their and the audience's perception of the world. Lucy finds out that society had begun to rebuild itself without the vaults, that the Vaults were deliberately designed experiments, and that her father was responsible for the destruction of a rebuild city. Flashbacks show that Cooper's wife worked for VaultTec, and was responsible not only for hiding the cold fusion Technology, which would have destroyed their profits by introducing freely renewable energy; but also for dropping the bomb which blasted the surface, so VaultTec execs could live in the vaults while their competitors were destroyed. Season 1 ends with Lucy and Cooper following Hank to the ruins of Las Vegas, war brewing between the Brotherhood and other factions, and the cold fusion reactor activated.
The expansive world of the Fallout videogame series offers considerable scope for a Television adaptation, and the series' makers made the wise decision to create an original story set in the established continuity with elements that will be familiar to gamers, rather than attempt to replicate the game itself. Like The Last of Us (2023-current), it provides a model of how a game adaptation can satisfy fan demands without slavishly imitating the original. It is also unusually successful in transposing the form and setting of the Western into an Earthbound sf narrative. Cooper plays a morally upstanding sheriff in a television Western, and a sequence in which his character shoots an unarmed man appears to represent (for him) a passing of traditional moral values. Nevertheless, the Near Future sequences play like an Alternate History, in which America has steadily retained the look and feel of the 1950s, and the kind of Western series that Cooper stars in have remained popular, so much so that it initially feels jarring that an interracial couple pass without comment, and there are seemingly no impediments to a Black woman achieving high status in a powerful company.
The meat of the series is of course the exuberantly violent and blackly comic scenes set in the vaults and the surface wasteland. Much of the Humour derives from Lucy's attempts to apply her positivity and belief in right and wrong, to situations in which they are wildly inappropriate, very well captured by Purnell's steadily less wide-eyed innocence. The rest of the cast is equally well chosen, with Coggin's deadpan Ghoul particularly memorable. The first season was a considerable success on streaming platforms; further series are expected. [CWa]
links
previous versions of this entry