HBO’s live-action adaptation of the Last Of Us video game was a big hit, proving that video games are finally respectable enough to serve as the basis for prestige television, and now we know when Amazon is going to join in on that fun with its Fallout adaptation—though the idea of Fallout being prestige television seems odd, since it’s not exactly a deadly serious franchise like The Last Of Us often is. Anyway, the official account for the Prime Video series tweeted out a teaser today with mascot Vault Boy revealing a release date of April 12, 2024 for the premiere of the series. That’s relatively soon for a show we haven’t seen or heard anything about!
The series, reportedly a canonical part of franchise history (according to Variety), will take place in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles and center around the denizens of Vault 33—one of dozens of underground bunkers hidden around the United States that “saved” people from a nuclear war, though most of the Vaults were actually secret social experiments designed to see how people would react to, say, living in a VR simulation of ‘50s suburbia, or being surrounded by clones of the same guy, or some kind of Shirley Jackson thing where someone had to be sacrificed once a year. So you survive, hooray, but shit still sucks.
We don’t know what the deal is with Vault 33, but the series will star Walton Goggins as one of the series’ many irradiated ghouls (who often look scarier than they behave), along with Ella Purnell, Kyle MacLachlan, Xelia Mendes-Jones and Aaron Moten. It comes from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan (who directed the first few episodes) and Lisa Joy, with Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner serving as writers and co-showrunners. Curiously, Variety referred to the series as a drama, but the games have always been deeply satirical and occasionally very wacky, so we don’t know if the show is going for something more traditionally dark or if Variety is just calling it a drama because it’s a show about a post-nuclear war wasteland full of Super Mutants and Mister Handy robots and hardscrabble societies that use old bottle caps as money.
