Gone are the days of “the video game curse.” In a post-The-Last-of-Us world, video game adaptations are almost expected to counter the expectations of their source material and take things super seriously, with grey, muddy color grading and heart-wrenching death scenes (Twisted Metal notwithstanding).
Fallout, Prime Video’s stab at adapting Bethesda’s hit franchise, may have found the balance between “Peak TV”-style drama and goofy video-game high jinks to deliver what may just be the next great apocalyptic TV saga.
At CCXP, Prime Video released a first look at the upcoming series. Check it out below.
Co-created and written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, Fallout follows Lucy (Yellowjackets star Ella Purnell) as Lucy, a young vault dweller who leaves the safety of her home and her father (Kyle MacLachlan) to explore what is now a nuclear wasteland. Much like the game’s open-world structure, Lucy will run into a number of interesting characters including an enigmatic researcher named Wilzig (Michael Emerson), who is seen in the trailer warning Lucy she’ll need to adapt.
It also seems like The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) will be a bigger focus in the season than fans first thought. The noseless mutant has his big moment in the trailer, but we also see him in flashback, hoisting a young girl onto a horse. How will his origin story feed into the main story? We don’t yet know, but executive producer Jonathan Nolan, who directed the first three episodes, told Vanity Fair will see the characters “chasing an artifact that has the potential to radically change the power dynamic in this world.”
But even with those high stakes, the absurdist humor and relentless clinging to normality from the original game persists. Chris Parnell appears to be playing a bureaucratic office worker who just happens to have one eye, Lucy reacts to a radiated dog attacking a mutant roach with a terrified “uh-huh” and even Fallout’s trademark use of atomic age music is clear with the entire trailer being set to Nat King Cole’s “I Don’t Want to See Tomorrow.”
Even though the story of Fallout the series isn’t based on any one story, we may just have a new challenger in the world of video game adaptations.
