Fallout season 2 will start filming in November, sooner than expected

Earlier this year, Amazon dropped all 10 episodes of Fallout on its Prime Video streaming service, and the world ate it up. Based on the video game series from Bethesda, Fallout is a post-apocalpytic adventure that's one-part black comedy, one-part sci-fi western, and one-part character-driven drama. The show quickly became a hit, and Amazon renewed it barely a week after the first season dropped.

Producers see Fallout lasting a while, but even so, we likely won't see a second season for a couple of years. That said, it sounds like Amazon is rushing a second season into production, as cast members Leslie Uggams (Betty) told ScreenRant that filming begins just next month: "We start November. I'm excited about it."

For a show that Amazon wasn't sure it wanted to renew until it actually dropped, a six-month turnaround time between the season 1 finale and filming on season 2 is quite fast. Even as recently as earlier this month, star Ella Purvell (Lucy) didn't seem to have any idea when the cameras would start rolling again. "I don’t have anything, I don’t know when we’re going to do it, I don’t have a script," she said a couple weeks back. "I have literally nothing." Either she was playing coy, Uggams is mistaken, or things really are moving that fast. If it's the latter, hopefully the producers still got the time they needed to craft an engaging second season.

Both Lucy and Betty are Vault dwellers, people who live in underground vaults where they're more or less insulated from the brutal post-apocalyptic world above. We learned towards the end of the first season that there was more to Betty than there first appeared; she's not just a kindly administrator making sure humanity survives through the harshest of conditions, she may have played a role in bringing about those conditions in the first place.

"That is an amazing, amazing show," Uggams said. "I am with the Vault People, so I didn't get to see what the Earth people were doing. So when it came on, I was blown away. But Betty's got some things up her sleeve. Just stay tuned."

Meanwhile, Lucy has left the Vault for the surface, where she's learning just how harsh and strange the world outside is. We'll catch up with the lot of them when Fallout returns for season 2, probably sometime in 2026. Even with the accellerated timeline, a complicated show like this will take around that long to prep. If Amazon wants the seasons after that to come out faster, it will need to renew the show earlier. With Fallout's huge success, that seems like a definitely possibility.

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