Vanity Fair released a first look at the new Fallout TV series today, showcasing stellar images from the post-apocalyptic show. Naturally, as with anything Bethesda-related, Todd Howard was there to comment, saying that the series will be a “unique” story canon to the Fallout universe.
The Fallout TV series will launch on Apr. 12, 2024, and is being spearheaded by Westworld‘s husband and wife creators, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Westworld does, in a stretch, resemble Fallout somewhat, blending the Western and sci-fi genres but without the nukes and retro-futurism that make Fallout difficult to place on a temporal scale.
The story starts in 2077, at the onset of the nuclear Armageddon that turns the world into a wasteland, which will be explored by the show’s main character, Lucy (played by Ella Purnell), 219 years after the fact. Purnell’s character has spent her entire life in a Vault, her father Hank (played by Kyle MacLachlan) being its overseer. An undisclosed crisis forces Lucy out of the Vault and into the nuclear waste that so many fans know and love. During her travels across a post-apocalyptic world frozen in time, Lucy encounters “giant insects, voracious mutant animal ‘abominations,’ and a human population of sunbaked miscreants,” according to Vanity Fair, hinting that the series may immediately feel like home for seasoned Fallout veterans.
Nolan has told Vanity Fair that the games capture stories of cultural division immensely and that he has sought to transfer that to the series in a unique genre-oriented manner. “The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades. We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way,” he said.
Lucy seems like a metaphor for the player, who goes in blind and doesn’t know what lies above the surface. Her cradled, well-off position in the Vault also seems to have made her soft, naive, and naturally unprepared for the post-nuclear world above. As Nolan, who directed the show’s first three episodes, says, Lucy has “luxury virtue.” She sees the world differently because she “never ran out of food,” providing an interesting take on the Vault cultures and the hierarchical divide that may have plagued them.
Todd Howard, the show’s executive producer and game director of the Fallout games, also had his two cents to add to the production and status of the Fallout TV series. “We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence,” Howard told Vanity Fair. He added that Fallout can be dark and dramatic but needs “a little bit of a wink.”
Howard added that the show would be a unique story, but Bethesda would “view what’s happening in the show as canon,” which would fundamentally enlarge the game’s massive lore. And he’s also jealous of particular parts, saying, “Why didn’t we do that?”
The Fallout TV series also stars Walton Goggins as a lore-friendly Ghoul. How Bethesda and Amazon have combined their forces to televize Fallout will be revealed to us in Spring 2024, and until then, we’re holding our breath.
