Welcome to the wasteland: all the news on Amazon’s Fallout TV series

Fallout is a mixture of contradictions. In one moment, the games are dark and gruesome; in the next, silly and playful. So when it came time to adapt the series into a streaming show on Amazon, nailing that eclectic tone was key. “I think it’s very fundamental to what Fallout is,” says series co-creator and showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet, “this mix of weird comedy and drama and violence and really compelling moral dilemmas.”

Unlike other video game adaptations like The Last of Us, Amazon’s Fallout isn’t a direct translation of an existing story. Instead, it takes place in its own corner of the universe. It’s set in Los Angeles, more than two centuries after the nuclear detonation that rendered America a wasteland, which gave the creators some freedom for approaching the challenge of Fallout’s varied tones. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the story is shown through three main characters with very different perspectives.

Fallout’s TV adaptation is coming to Prime Video a day early. The new series will now make its debut on Wednesday, April 10th, 2024, at 9PM ET / 6PM PT, rather than on April 11th.

Walton Goggins, who plays nuclear wasteland survivor The Ghoul, made the announcement on Monday, saying the early premiere comes as a “thank-you” to fans. All eight episodes will appear on the platform at the same time, so you might have to restrain yourself from watching them all in one go.

It’s still too early to say if Amazon’s live-action take on Fallout will be any good. But the first few trailers at least make one thing clear: the show seems like it’s nailing the distinct vibe of the games.

The newly released second trailer follows a lot of the same beats as the first, tracking a Vault Dweller named Lucy (Ella Purnell) heading out into the Wasteland only to discover how dangerous things have become two centuries after the apocalypse. The show looks gritty and violent, as you’d expect from a post-apocalyptic series, but also balances that out with a goofy sense of humor and playfully retrofuturistic style. Case in point: a Mister Orderly bot that simply wants to harvest Lucy’s organs. No big deal.

War never changes — and neither do the vibes in Fallout. After a bit of teasing, Amazon just released the first teaser trailer for its live-action adaption of Fallout, and it starts out a lot like the games: a vault dweller leaves the comfort of their home to explore the dangerous postapocalyptic wasteland outside. And boy, are things dangerous.

This time around, the vault dweller is named Lucy (Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell), and she experiences a lot of the series’ key moments in the short trailer. That means horribly mutated animals, slapped-together cities, the militant Brotherhood of Steel, vault uprisings, some Wild West shootouts, and a very good dog who is also a killer. And of course, there are the classic tunes — in this case, it’s Nat King Cole’s “I Don’t Want To See Tomorrow.” The show is set 200 years after the apocalypse; the trailer actually ends with the nuclear explosion that changes the world for good.

Amazon has yet to release a public trailer for its highly anticipated Fallout series, but at least we now know when it’ll arrive on our TV screens. The streaming giant has revealed that Fallout — a live-action adaptation of Bethesda’s popular RPG video game franchise — will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video.

The announcement was made on October 23rd, otherwise known to Fallout fans as “Fallout Day” — the in-game date that marks the beginning of the Great War that turns the world into an irradiated nuclear wasteland. Bethesda’s executive producer and game director Todd Howard is an executive producer on the series, which stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight), Aaron Moten (Emancipation), Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), and Sarita Choudhury (Homeland).

Amazon and Bethesda have started to share itty bitty teases of the upcoming Fallout TV series for Prime Video. We still don’t know when the show based on the post-apocalyptic RPG series is coming out, but the hints give us just a glimpse of what to expect it’s eventually released.

The Prime Video Twitter account shared an intriguing image from the show in a tweet on Tuesday. Three people are standing in front of a vault door that opens to somewhere that’s very brightly lit, and a silhouette of someone is standing in the vault opening. Mysteriously, there’s also a pair of legs on the floor that are nearly out of sight — perhaps a casualty of some kind of skirmish.

Amazon’s TV series based on the Fallout video games is moving into production this year. Deadline and Variety report that Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley) will be showrunners on the project; the official Fallout Twitter account retweeted Deadline’s story by way of confirmation.

The Prime Video show will be executive-produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of Westworld. Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard and Bethesda Softworks’ James Altman are also on board as executive producers. Nolan will direct the first episode, according to Deadline and Variety.