Fallout TV show: key information
– Launching in April on Prime Video
– Developed alongside Bethesda Game Studios, makers of the Fallout video games
– First trailer released in December 2023
– Main cast confirmed in November 2023
– Official plot synopsis revealed
– Will tell a brand-new story in Fallout‘s fictional universe
– Narrative will be canon in Bethesda’s beloved game series
– Future seasons tentatively discussed
Amazon’s Fallout TV show is one of our most anticipated series. Bethesda’s hugely successful post-apocalyptic video game franchise is, like a growing number of its contemporaries (including The Last of Us), making the leap from playable title to live-action TV project, and we’re certainly hyped for its arrival. Indeed, it’s one of 10 exciting TV shows we can’t wait for in early 2024.
No matter if you’re a massive Fallout fan who can’t wait to see how faithfully Prime Video will adapt the popular game series, or a newcomer to Bethesda’s pulpy sci-fi world, our Fallout TV show hub is packed with all the latest intel you need. From its confirmed release date and cast list, to story speculation and its exciting first trailer, we’ve got you covered.
Potential Fallout TV series spoilers are discussed from this point on, so turn back now – or use the navigation bar on the left side of this page to skip ahead where necessary – if you don’t want to know anything of significance.
Fallout TV show release date
The Fallout TV show is set to premiere on Prime Video – one of the world’s best streaming services – on Friday, April 12. Considering most Fallout games have been released in the latter part of any given year, though, we think Prime Video missed an apocalyptic trick with its Fallout TV show release date.
Fallout‘s TV adaptation was announced in July 2020, with Amazon confirming the creators of Westworld were bringing it to life. That duo is Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who developed the series but aren’t its showrunners – that honor falls to Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, whose credits include 2019 Marvel movie Captain Marvel (Robertson-Dworet) and Silicon Valley (Wagner). Amazon confirmed the pair’s involvement when the cameras began rolling on Fallout’s live-action iteration in January 2022.
Fallout TV show trailer
The first teaser for Amazon’s Fallout TV show was released in December 2023, with the trailer finally opening the vault on Prime Video’s authentically apocalyptic series.
Understandably, the footage doesn’t give too much away about its wider narrative. However, it does introduce us to its three main characters, as well as showing off how Amazon has recaptured the retro-futuristic, dystopian vibe, and aesthetic of Bethesda’s beloved games.
The trailer’s unveiling came five days after our first look at Fallout’s TV series via various official images. You should read our article on seven things that the Fallout TV show images don’t tell you if you’re searching for more clues about what was debuted in them and the trailer, too.
Fallout TV show cast
Here’s the confirmed cast for the Fallout TV show so far:
- Ella Purnell as Lucy
- Walton Goggins as The Ghoul
- Aaron Moten as Maximus
- Kyle McLachlan as Hank
- Moisés Arias as Norm
- Mike Doyle as Mr. Spencer
- Michael Emerson as Wilzig
- Johnny Pemberton as Thaddeus
- Cherien Dabis as Birdie
- Dale Dickey as Ma June
- Matty Cardarople as Huey
- Dave Register as Chet
- Rodrigo Luzzi as Reg
- Annabel O’Hagen as Steph
- Sarita Choudhury as TBA
- Leslie Uggams as TBA
- Chris Parnell as TBA
- Frances Turner as TBA
- Zach Cherry as TBA
Of the above, Purnell (Arcane, Army of the Dead), Goggins (Ant-Man and the Wasp, Justified), and Moten (Emancipation, Father Stu) are its three leads.
Purnell’s Lucy, though, is arguably the series’ primary protagonist. The Army of the Dead star was locked into Fallout’s lead role in March 2022, one month after Goggins was announced as the series’ first cast member. Per a Prime Video press blast, Lucy is an “optimistic Vault dweller” whose idealistic view of the world is challenged when she volunteers to embark on a dangerous trip across the wasteland.
Goggins, meanwhile, has been installed as The Ghoul, a ruthless and cynical bounty hunter who “hides a mysterious past”. The show’s first trailer suggested we’ll learn more about his backstory throughout its eight-episode run, with the teaser showing his family-centric life (he was a human called Cooper Howard) prior to a devastating nuclear event that destroyed the world as we know it.
Please enjoy this new high quality photograph of Lucy. She’s an upstanding member of Vault 33, where she spends her time preparing for the future! pic.twitter.com/q2zF9JT3OrJanuary 16, 2024
As for Moten, he’ll portray Maximus, a member of Fallout’s iconic Brotherhood of Steel faction, a group of military hardware-toting zealots who plug the sociopolitical gap in the absence of an official government. Labeled “a young soldier with a tragic past”, Maximus is said to believe in the Brotherhood’s mission to bring stability to the wasteland at any cost. We suspect, though, that his worldview – like Lucy’s – will be questioned as the plot progresses.
McLachlan (Twin Peaks) is signed on to play Hank, Lucy’s father and leader of Vault 33. Other confirmed character identities include Michael Emerson (Lost) as Wilzig, an enigmatic wanderer who reportedly helps Lucy on her quest (per Vanity Fair), Mike Doyle (Law and Order) as someone called Mr. Spencer, and Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island) as Norm, Lucy’s brother.
Fallout TV show plot
Here’s the official synopsis for the Fallout TV show, courtesy of Amazon Studios: “Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hell-scape their ancestors left behind – and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.”
Not much to go on, then, but we’ve learned a bit more about the series’ plot, and how its main and supporting characters factor into it, from its cast and crew.
First up, a fictional history lesson: in the Fallout franchise, a two-hour nuclear bomb exchange between the US and China ((known in-universe as the ‘Great War’) decimates planet Earth in 2077. Those lucky (read: rich) enough to survive the brief but destructive event did so in Vaults – subterranean bunkers, built across the US from 2054 onwards by a mysterious company called Vault-Tec, that could support up to 1,000 people each in the event of nuclear war.
Welcome to the surface! Enjoy this thread of new companions, and Please Stand By for important updates. pic.twitter.com/aaQ4mF3Y9SDecember 2, 2023
Fallout’s TV adaptation, according to Vanity Fair, is set 219 years after that cataclysmic event. Lucy, a wide-eyed and naive inhabitant of the Los Angeles-located Vault 33 (one of three Vaults we’ll see, Jonathan Nolan told IGN), ventures above ground for the first time when she willingly agrees to embark on a one-person rescue mission for… well, reasons that enter spoiler territory. As Nolan pointed out to Vanity Fair, though, Lucy’s utopian view of the world is quickly shattered and that “her collision with the hard reality of other people’s experiences and what happened to the people who, frankly, were left behind, left to die” makes for a chastening experience that threatens the virtuous perspective she learned about underground.
As the show’s likely first season progresses, Lucy’s story will intersect with The Ghoul’s and Maximus’. It’s unclear how and when this will happen, but expect dramatic fireworks when the trio cross paths and their wildly different outlooks on life subsequently clash.
Long-time Fallout fans will be pleased to learn that the TV adaptation hasn’t left the franchise’s dark, absurd, and twisted sense of humor – complete with macabre levels of levity and sardonic slant on modern day America – behind. Bethesda Games director Todd Howard, who oversees the Fallout franchise and is one of the show’s executive producers, told Vanity Fair: “We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence. Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and post-apocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink. I think they [Nolan, Joy, and the showrunners] threaded that needle really well.”
As mentioned, Fallout’s prestige TV iteration will also explore 21st century issues and themes through its story, and two particular 60s/70s movies were key inspirations behind weaving such topics and melodrama through the show’s otherwise tongue-in-cheek tone.
“I do not think you would be willing to do what it takes to survive up here.” #FALLOUT pic.twitter.com/i411195LUsDecember 2, 2023
“Just as M*A*S*H gets to talk about Vietnam through the lens of the Korean War,” Nolan told Empire magazine, “we get to talk about the mess we’re in now through the lens of… ‘What if everybody just gets on with it and destroys the f****g world?'”
“We talked a lot about The Good, The Bad And The Ugly,” Wagner added. “That’s three characters in search of a box of gold, so we asked ourselves, ‘What’s the gold in this world?'”
As for the silly bugs and ridiculously funny glitches that the game series is renowned for, don’t expect any such references to appear in Prime Video’s adaptation. Speaking to IGN, Wagner said: “One of my fondest memories playing [Bethesda game The Elder Scrolls II:] Daggerfall is a moment where I just bumped into the wall and watched the entire world fly away from me as I fell off. It was just transcendental and wonderful.
“I was like, can we get this in the show? And not in the first season, but it’s definitely on my mind as a concept. But yeah, we stayed clear of too many winks… we really just want people to buy into this world and not be pushed out of it, because a tall order. It’s a pretty crazy place and we just want to get people invested in that first.”
That said, fans can expect to see some of the game series’ most famous iconography – the smiling, thumbs up-toting Vault Boy, who’ll get his own origin story in the TV show – throughout. There’ll be plenty of other nods to the games, too, such as the inclusion of the wrist-mounted Pip Boy device, mutated insects and monsters aplenty, and the iconic costumes/armor worn by Vault dwellers and the Brotherhood of Steel.
Lastly, everything that happens in the Fallout TV show is official lore in Bethesda’s award-winning franchise. “We view what’s happening in the show as canon,” Howard told Vanity Fair. “That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion. I looked at it [some revised elements] like ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that?'”
Adds Wagner (via a different IGN article): “We didn’t start from a place of characters from the games,” Wagner said. “We set things after. We kind of told ourselves, this is Fallout 5, this is just another installation, and we’re starting with fresh snow.”
Will there be more seasons of Amazon’s Fallout TV show?
Right now, Amazon is just banking on its Fallout TV show being a certified hit. We’d be surprised if the series doesn’t make it onto our best Prime Video shows list post-release, but it’s sometimes hard to tell if an expensive show has the quality to do so.
If Fallout is successful, we’ll likely get more seasons. Speaking to IGN, Nolan suggested there are tentative plans in place for future installments, saying: “The question of how that larger story would play season to season was something that we started a conversation with Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet early about that… and what Geneva and Graham have cooked up is very, very exciting. So we’re excited to continue telling this story if we’re so lucky.”
However, Nolan added that, for the time being “our main goal is to deliver one terrific season of television”. For now, then, we’ll eagerly await the arrival of Fallout season 1 and hope for a second season renewal if it proves to be incredibly popular.
For more Prime Video-based coverage, read our guides on Invincible season 2 part 2, The Rings of Power season 2, all of the new Prime Video movies to arrive recently, and our pick of the best Prime Video movies.
