‘Fallout’: How to Succeed in the Postapocalypse Without Really Trying
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When The Last of Us debuted early in 2023, I began my rave review by saying, “Among the many compliments I can give HBO’s The Last of Us is that it eventually made me forget that it’s based on a video game.” Some gamers took this as both a backhanded compliment for the show and a blanket dismissal of the artistry of video games. But the point I argued then, and would argue now, is that the demands of an interactive game are fundamentally different from the demands of a narrative controlled only by the storytellers, and that nearly every video game translation prior to Last of Us struggled mightily to make elements of the former work well as the latter.
With The Last of Us a massive success with viewers, critics, and Emmy voters, the bar has now been raised, especially for any adaptation that hopes to attract viewers who don’t already know and love a particular game. If something doesn’t function as a television show for anyone without preexisting brand loyalty, return to the drawing board and start over. Or perhaps find a game that’s more adaptable.
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If nothing else, Amazon’s big-budget take on the popular Fallout franchise functions as a TV series. There are three (or four, depending on your point of view) distinct main characters, all engaged in clearly delineated stories throughout the eight-episode first season, all within a fully-realized post-apocalyptic world. From my minimal understanding of the games, the show’s creators, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, have taken some elements from the source material, but also added a lot of their own ideas, particularly when it comes to plot and character arcs. And Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan brings obvious style to the whole affair as director of the series premiere, as well as executive producer. There were very few points during my binge of the season where the only way I could explain a creative decision was to shrug and assume something similar happened in the game.
But if it’s one thing to work as a TV show, it’s another to work as a good TV show, and this standard proves tougher for Fallout to attain. It has some fun components, and the great Walton Goggins (Justified, The Righteous Gemstones) delivers as usual in a dual-ish role. But a lot of it feels like it’s trying way too hard to grab your attention, all while so many of its ideas are recycled not from video games, but from other, more interesting post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows.
The series actually opens in a manner that very much suggests something along the lines of The Last of Us. We are in a retro-future version of California, where all the fashions are out of the Fifties, while the technology is beyond anything we have today. B-movie Western star Cooper Howard (Goggins) is entertaining the kids at a birthday party, while all the adults are panicking about reports of impending nuclear war. When a mushroom cloud rises up in the distance, Cooper grabs his daughter, and they race off on the back of his trusted horse, in search of a safe place to hide.
But Fallout is not the story of a father and daughter wandering the near aftermath of a global catastrophe. Instead, the action jumps forward 200 years, to the societies that have risen in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. Lucy (Ella Purnell from Yellowjackets) has grown up inside one of the many underground vaults that were built back in Cooper Howard’s time, each small community doing its best to stay sane and healthy away from the sun, and with a relatively closed population. (As Lucy prepares for her arranged marriage to a man from a nearby vault, she admits to being relieved to get the real thing “after 10 years of cousin stuff.”) Lucy is as fundamentally chipper as a Disney princess, though a bit hornier and more proficient with weaponry when the need arises. But when tragedy strikes her vault, she finds herself up on the surface, struggling to make sense of the world that’s been trying to continue to go on while her people were hiding.
Among those groups are the Brotherhood of Steel, a religious army that models itself on the knights of the Crusades, only here the knights wear mech suits, while the squires — including Maximus (Aaron Moten) — struggle to keep up toting bags of heavy weaponry. And then there are the ghouls, who exist somewhere on a continuum between human and zombie, depending on how long it’s been since the poisoned environment made them that way, and how much medicine they’ve been able to scrounge. In fact, Cooper Howard is still alive two centuries later, sort of, and he — now dressed and behaving like one of the ruthless bandits that his movie alter egos used to fight — is simply known as “the Ghoul.”
There are vault dwellers, ghouls, and knights in the games, but these three characters — plus supporting figures like Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), Maximus’ rival Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), and the mysterious Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) — are largely inventions of the show, with varying degrees of success.
Goggins is in the pocket as the Ghoul, commanding the screen and making a meal out of lines like, “Well, well, well. Why, is this an Amish production of The Count of Monte Cristo, or the weirdest circle jerk I’ve ever been invited to?” And as Cooper, he adds some necessary emotion to flashbacks that are otherwise primarily concerned with filling in backstory. Maximus, on the other hand, is mostly bland and forgettable, until a couple of episodes late in the season lean more into comedy with him. Many of the actors who appear in cameos, like Michael Emerson, Chris Parnell, or Matt Berry (who provides the voice of a robot, like he did on The Book of Boba Fett, but with actual jokes this time), make a bigger impression than several more prominent regular characters.
Ella Purnell has the tough task of functioning as the series’ emotional fulcrum, as Lucy straddles the wide-eyed innocence of vault life with the gore and amorality of what happens in the real world. She’s up to the assignment, though her material tends to be stronger whenever Lucy reluctantly puts aside her Pollyanna belief in the fundamental goodness of people and just does what needs to get done.
And speaking of that clash of worldviews, find someone who loves you like this show loves to ironically juxtapose scenes of despair or stylized, gory violence with upbeat or wistful Forties and Fifties pop songs. The premiere’s big action set piece plays out to the sounds of “Some Enchanted Evening,” while a later episode alone features Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” The Platters’ “Only You,” and Dinah Washington’s “What A Diff’rence A Day Makes” — all great songs, but ones that are probably due for retirement from all soundtracks, and particularly from this type of usage. The songs, and many of the performances, signal that the series is meant to be a satiric adventure. More often than not, though, it’s as if the creative team was able to settle on a comedic tone without coming up with nearly enough jokes to match.
Most of Fallout is at least energetic, other than a subplot about Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias) investigating the vault’s leadership structure. And the design of the world really pops. But, like the soundtrack, there are pieces of so many other movies and shows — Apple’s Silo beat it to market by a year with its own (albeit more dramatic) portrait of post-apocalyptic underground life — that much of it plays as ripping off other material, even though the games have been around in various forms since the late Nineties.
The Last of Us could have been similarly hamstrung, of course, since so much of its world echoes The Walking Dead. It was just made with such craft that the similarities didn’t matter. It’s no more fair to hold Fallout to that standard than it is to compare every single new cop drama to, say, The Wire, of course. But even if Last of Us didn’t exist, Fallout would still feel like an arch and overly-familiar series, with enough interesting performances and background details to keep it from being a waste of time, but not enough spark of its own to be fully satisfying. Though maybe fans of the game will feel differently.
All eight episodes of Fallout begin streaming April 11 on Amazon Prime Video. I’ve seen the whole season.
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