Why Fallout Is the Best Thing Streaming Right Now

Amazon Fallout, based on the beloved video game franchise, dropped on Prime Video in April 2024 and immediately proved that the post-Last of Us wave of game adaptations could sustain quality. The show captures the games signature blend of retro-futuristic Americana, pitch-black humor, and genuine menace.

The show is canon, which is unusual for a video game adaptation. Todd Howard, who has run the series at Bethesda since Fallout 3, executive produces, and the story is set in 2296, nine years after Fallout 4 and more than two centuries after the bombs. Nothing in it contradicts the games, and one late reveal about the fate of Shady Sands rewrites a piece of timeline that players had assumed was settled.

The series follows three converging storylines: Lucy, a vault dweller played by Ella Purnell; Maximus, a Brotherhood of Steel squire played by Aaron Moten; and The Ghoul, a pre-war cowboy actor turned irradiated bounty hunter played by Walton Goggins in a performance of pure magnetism.

Eight episodes, released on the same day in April 2024, running fifty to sixty-five minutes each, so about eight hours in total. Jonathan Nolan directed the first three, with Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner running the show. The three storylines do not converge until the back half, which means the early episodes ask for patience with characters who have not met yet.

Goggins steals the show. His transformation from idealistic 1950s Hollywood actor to a 200-year-old gunslinger is both the show best visual effect and its most compelling narrative thread.

The production design nails the Fallout aesthetic. The vaults are retro-futuristic time capsules. The wasteland is a sun-bleached hellscape dotted with the ruins of mid-century American optimism.

The aesthetic has a logic behind it. In the Fallout timeline the transistor was never commercialised, so technology carried on down the vacuum-tube road into chrome, bakelite, valve screens and atomic cars. Culture froze somewhere around 1955 while the weapons kept improving. That is why a Pip-Boy looks like a wartime field radio, and why the pre-war advertising is so cheerful about things that should be terrifying.

The dark comedy lands because the show commits to it. Extreme violence is played for laughs, corporate jingles soundtrack atrocities, and the gap between America cheery pre-war propaganda and its apocalyptic reality is mined for satire.

The soundtrack does most of the tonal work. The games run on pre-war standards played through an in-world radio station, with the Ink Spots' I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire as the franchise signature, and the show keeps the trick, opening on Nat King Cole's Orange Colored Sky while a birthday party ends in fire. Cheerful music over atrocity is the joke the whole thing is built on.

If it sends you to the games, start with Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian built it in eighteen months in 2010 and it is still the best-written entry, a four-way political standoff over a hydroelectric dam that you can talk your way through almost entirely. Fallout 4 is the better shooter and the weaker story. Fallout 3 has aged worst. New Vegas costs a few pounds in most sales, and the second season of the show goes there.

Stream on Prime Video at https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Fallout.

Fallout is essential because it manages to be simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, a satire of American exceptionalism wrapped in a post-apocalyptic adventure.