Stream It Or Skip It: 'Fallout' on Prime Video, about people navigating a barren futuristic post-nuclear war world (2024)

Series being adapted from video games have become all the rage lately, mainly because streaming services are looking everywhere for IP to mine. But some games are so sprawling, with a massive world to cover, that it’s easy to wonder how it can become a series. A new show on Prime Video, adapted from a popular role-playing video game, aims to find out.

FALLOUT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “THE END.” We see a lasso fly in the air, and a cowboy in a fancy outfit is on a horse twirling it.

The Gist: That cowboy is Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), who was a film and TV star but now works kid’s parties. He brings along his young daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) to help. In many respects, the world seems futuristic, but much of it feels like it’s stuck in the 1950s. After fielding rude questions about his career, he’s asked to give his signature thumbs up move. He refuses, mainly because the country seems to be under a pretty severe nuclear war threat at the moment.

He tells Janey that he learned in the Marines that if the bomb goes off and the mushroom cloud is bigger than his thumb, he might as well not bother running. That’s when Janey notices the first cloud, hitting downtown Los Angeles. Then other bombs hit, and the shockwave speeds towards where Cooper and his daughter are.

“219 YEARS LATER.” After the apocalypse, thousands of people created underground “vaults” in order to preserve society. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), daughter of Vault 33 overseer Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) has been accepted into the vault system’s marriage program, set to marry a man from Vault 32 in exchange for a dowry. She’s excited about having relations with a man who isn’t a cousin. A delegation from Vault 32, led by Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), comes over, and the wedding happens in a room that is designed to look like a farm.

But when Lucy and her new husband go back to her quarters to consummate, and Lucy soon figures out that her groom isn’t from Vault 32 at all; everyone who came over was an invader from the surface. Lucy and a few others in Vault 33 manage to survive the onslaught, but Hank is taken by Moldaver and her crew. Lucy vows to go to the surface and try to find her father, something that’s unheard of. With the help of her brother Norm (Moises Arias), she makes her way outside.

Up on the surface, Maximus (Aaron Moten) is in training for an organization called the Brotherhood of Steel. He joined, he says, because “I want to hurt the people who hurt me.” When his best friend Dane (Xelia Mendes-Jones) is promoted to squire, who is a helper for the Knights who wear massive weaponized armor, his anger gets the better of him. Dane wakes up the next morning and puts on her boot, only to get her leg sliced open by a razor blade. When Maximus is questioned by an elder cleric about the incident, he claims he doesn’t know anything about it or who did it. He ends up getting promoted into Dane’s slot, just in time for the Knights to go out to find a denizen of the Enclave who escaped.

Also on the surface, a man named Honcho (Mykelti Williamson) is with two fellow henchmen to look for someone called The Ghoul (Goggins). He thinks this guy, who has been alive for a very long time and gets a piece of him chopped off every year, will help them get a big payday. But The Ghoul turns the tables on them and walks off by himself.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In a lot of ways, Fallout, based on the role-playing video game of the same name, reminds us of the post-apocalyptic Apple TV+ series Silo. Westworld also comes to mind; that show’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are EPs of Fallout, as well.

Our Take: Fallout was adapted by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, and they’ve been able to corral the game’s sprawling narrative into the stories surrounding Lucy, Maximus and The Ghoul. It’s one of those shows that immediately demands your attention, and doesn’t spend a ton of time in world-building. Yes, there are a lot of concepts that a viewer who is not familiar with the game has to wrap their mind around. But the idea of world-building in this post-apocalyptic landscape feels a little pointless when the worlds that the three main characters are going to inhabit will fundamentally change pretty quickly.

Will the main characters eventually interact? Probably. There are battles to fight, societies to discover, and pasts to explore. For now, we don’t necessarily know that The Ghoul and Cooper are the same person, given the time period that has elapsed. But it’s a pretty good bet that they are, and there is no one who can embody a gunslinging bad guy who used to be good better than Goggins can.

Purnell’s character Lucy is supposed to be the naive one, who has never lived on the surface and has no idea about the chaos she’s about to encounter. But, as we see her fight with her new husband as he tries to kill her, she is not without skills, and the gumption that she uses to go out to the surface to find her father will serve her well. In the meantime, Norm is going to be underground, finding out exactly what kind of evil stuff is happening down there, and trying to avoid the leadership scrum that will occur, with council members like Betty Pearson (Leslie Uggams) and Woody Thomas (Zach Cherry) vying to take Hank’s place.

We know a lot less about Maximus, but we do know he had a troubled childhood and he’s ambitious. Will he eventually move from squire to Knight? And how honorable is he?

So much of what the first episode set up is interesting, even if it spreads itself a bit thin narratively. What we’re curious about is if Robertson-Dworet and Wagner can equally service all of these stories.

Sex and Skin: There is the consummation scene between Lucy and her new husband; he gets naked but she keeps her wedding dress on.

Parting Shot: After The Ghoul dispatches the group who came to get him, he takes their weapons and walks off.

Sleeper Star: Matt Berry, Michael Emerson, Chris Parnell and Michael Rapaport are among the guest stars, and we see them all during the “This season on” highlight reel at the end. We also like Dave Register as Chet, Lucy’s hapless cousin who is hopelessly in love with her.

Most Pilot-y Line: There is a hint that the nuclear holocaust took place in 2077, but we’re not sure why the world of that era seemed stuck in the 1950s. We’re sure we’ll get that explanation at some point.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Fallout does a good job drawing viewers into its expansive world without needing a ton of exposition to explain what’s going on. It helps that the show is visually stunning and filled with fine performances by Goggins, Purnell and others.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.