Fallout (Amazon Show) Review - Of The People, For The People

Capturing what makes the Fallout series endearing as a TV show is a tall order. So much of the experience relies on the sense of discovery that comes from wandering the Wasteland. You may enter a subway tunnel on a whim and encounter a city made up of people who think they're vampires, or meet a guy who is also a tree. Whether it's speaking with the leaders of factions about their values and deciding whether they're your values, or just sneaking around a supermarket overtaken by murderous robots, Fallout is often about the strange and fascinating stories you stumble on along the way to whatever it is you're supposed to be doing.

And in that, Amazon's eight-episode streaming adaptation of Fallout, from Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, falls short. The show is at its best when it sticks close to its protagonists, who are all separately journeying through the Wasteland. But a huge part of the story is made up of narrative diversions, and these rarely get much attention. While the stories of the large cast of major characters and their experiences are compelling, the pit stops themselves are often a little flat.

Fallout maintains all the familiar conventions of its video game counterparts, and there are a lot of elements of that formula that serve it well. After a brief stint in a 1950s-inspired retro-future Los Angeles, we see atomic bombs annihilate the city and, by implication, the rest of the world. More than 200 years later, the story picks up underground in one of Fallout's familiar shelter societies, Vault 33, where extremely polite people live idyllic--if boring--lives as they await the day when diminished background radiation will allow them to return to the surface.