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The first official look at Amazon's Fallout series is here

I don't want to set the world on fire, but this looks nuclearly good

Fallout TV series - Ella Purnell
Image credit: Amazon/Vanity Fair

Marketing for Amazon and Bethesda's Fallout TV series is about to ramp up, and here's our first proper look at the show, courtesy of Prime Video, with a story in Vanity Fair to support the images. In case you can't read the whole VF piece, which requires a subscription, we've collected the juiciest bits of info, so you can read on below, while admiring the official promo images in the gallery below.

The new series, debuting on Prime Video next spring, starts with a nuclear war breaking out in the year 2077. The Fallout timeline, however, differs from ours in that the late-21st-century era had a deep nostalgia for the America of the 1940s. Fallout is famous for its retro-futurist aesthetic, and that's being kept around in the show, which is seemingly canon to the video games' world and history.

The show has been developed for TV by Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. After the prologue that sets up the show's world, the story fast-forwards 219 years and we meet Lucy (Ella Purnell), who has lived her entire life inside a subterranean vault alongside an entire (controlled) society. Much like in the games, Lucy is eventually forced to venture above the surface, and that's when the adventure starts.

Nolan, who also directs the first three episodes, explained their approach to the show and the science fiction of the Fallout universe: "We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way... I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.’" The world presented in the show will also get bigger once other two lead characters are introduced: Maximus (Aaron Moten), a member of the knight-like Brotherhood of Steel, and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a "gruesomely scarred roughrider" described as "the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly all rolled into one." The rest of the cast includes Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), Sarita Choudhury (Homeland), Moisés Arias (Hannah Montana), and Michael Emerson (Lost), among others.

Many fans are worried the show might just go dark Fallout's post-apocalypse and forget about its unique brand of dark humor and satire, but Nolan seems well aware of what makes Bethesda's game series so special: "It’s a dark world in many ways... But the games were fun to play, fun to explore, and I think that was a mandate for us: to make sure that it was enjoyable to spend time in this universe."

Fallout premieres on Amazon's Prime Video on April 12, 2024.


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