Summary
Fans of theFalloutseries on Prime Video can rest easy as the showrunners behind the successful first season offer an update on the second installment of the show and discuss how they approach potential fan fatigue.
Fallouthas been a staple of the game industry and is one of the more popular titles from Bethesda in recent years, a feat made massive by the company’s ownership of theElder Scrollsseries. With its dystopian tones spun off from real-world conflict and the outlandish faction wars the story presents, fans of the games have long since called for a proper adaptation of the game in live action. While some failed attempts have been made to bring the games to life in movie form, no attempt at adaptation was a success untilAmazon greenlit aFalloutseries adaptation from the creators ofWestworld.
After a great first season that many thinkcould positively affect future installments of theElder Scrollsgames, fans have been eager to learn more about the show’s second season, which has been decidedly quiet following the end of season one. In an interview withThe Hollywood Reporterduring which he quipped that nothing was sacred anymore in the adaptation landscape, showrunner Graham Wagner gave an encouraging update about the progress on penning the second season and how lessons from the first time around will make the process more efficient. “We’re writing and we’re going as fast as we can while still hanging on to the quality,” Wagner explained. “The real tension of season two is you want to turn it out as quickly as possible without sacrificing anything in the process. It’s been a much easier task writing this season, because we have a show to look to. We were still figuring out the tone of the show, right down to the sound mix, during season one. The work we did in season one is going to speed up season two.” Wagner also addressed the show’s plans to beat audience fatigue when asked aboutFallout’snow-commonplace science fiction setting.
Regarding the dystopia part, we’re there, too. (Laughs.) That was our priority going into this, because we’re going to work on this show for a very long time. It has to be fun. Hopefully by being fun for us, it is fun to watch. Even though it’s an apocalypse show, we wanted to make sure that we focused on human behavior — which I don’t think can be obliterated by nuclear bombs. Our idiosyncrasies would survive. We didn’t know all the episodes were going to drop at once, so we asked ourselves, “What’s the apocalypse show you want to come back to next week?” It can’t be a trudge through the wasteland. That would be miserable.
Co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet also offered some interesting insight into the creative process behind the series when buttressing the point about how they set about livening up the wasteland setting. “That was why we ended up focusing on three characters, three points of view. Graham had just rewatched The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and pitched it as, “What if we did our version of that?” I thought it was brilliant because Fallout is all about factionalism, how humanity is doomed to break into warring factions over and over again. It let us create three point-of-view characters, each from a different faction.” This emphasis on the fracturing of humanity was a masterstroke and is the reason whythe show was able to reignite a long-runningFalloutfan debate
The Amazon show’s success is evident in the fact that eventhe nextFalloutgame could take a page from its bookand offer players multiple playable characters to really deepen the lore and give fans a more dynamic, multifaceted view of the world that has grown so vast over the course of multiple games. Until then, the series itself can double down on its own best themes in the upcoming second season and solidify itself further as a great adaptation.
The first season of Amazon’sFalloutseries is available to stream on Prime Video.
Fallout
Created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout is based on the post-apocalyptic RPG gaming franchise that started in the 1990s. Set hundreds of years after the Great War, Lucy leaves her Vault bunker to travel the Wasteland in search of her kidnapped father.
