Making a post-apocalypse show like Fallout in 2024, series star Walton Goggins says, has a lot of irony to it. “We live in a chaotic world,” he tells Consequence. “I don’t know that we’ve never not lived in a chaotic world, going back 5,000 years on some level. But people are unsure about a lot of different things right now — and this just so happens to coincide with the uncertainty in the world that we live in now. It hasn’t gone unnoticed.”
The series, based on the acclaimed video game franchise, is set in as grim an apocalyptic wasteland as you could imagine; giant cockroaches and roving raiders of both the alive and undead variety being largely what remains on the surface of the Earth, following a cataclysmic series of bombings over 200 years ago. Yet Fallout sets itself apart not with the brutality of its story but its humor, an element of the games that the executive producers were determined to bring into their story.
The first three episodes of the series were directed by executive producer Jonathan Nolan (Westworld), who says that they first began talking about a Fallout adaptation in 2019, “and that feels like at least three apocalypses ago,” he laughs.
At that point, Nolan continues, “The concerns of the game series and the show felt almost old-fashioned. Now, sadly, after the pandemic, and the resurgence of warfare and violence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it just feels, unfortunately, like the show has gotten more and more relevant every year that we’ve been working on it. I would happily have it be a little less relevant and go back to being a little retro. But through a pandemic, through all of the scary shit that’s happening right now, it has been nice to work on this project, that has a bit of a sense of humor, even if it’s dark humor. I think there’s been a bit of expiation in that for all of us.”
Michael Emerson (Lost), who plays a mysterious scientist who knows more than most, likes “the way violence and humor are merged in this project. Looking at myself with my own foot blown off — there’s something…” He can’t quite find the word, trying a few on: “Comic, absurd, ghastly, monstrous… There’s something cuckoo about it. So that’s been one of the adventures of my work on Fallout.”
That very specific sense of humor is something Nolan traces back to his experience playing the first game. “I never quite felt that tone brought together before, where you have this dark, violent, epic landscape, but it’s infected with political satire, subversion, and, and humor. I had just never experienced anything like that before, and it’s one of the things we hope to bring to an audience who maybe had never played the games before.”