TV shows based on video games are having a moment right now, with series like The Last of Us and Fallout leading the charge. (RIP Halo.) The first season of Amazon's Fallout series — about humanity's struggle to survive years after a nuclear war blighted the landscape — was funny, exciting, sweet and very popular with both audiences and the Hollywood elite. For proof of that, look no further than its 16 Emmy nominations, including for Best Drama Series and Best Actor, for Walton Goggins' performance as the Ghoul. (No nomination for Ella Purnell as Lucy, though, which shall not stand.)
Showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner talked to Deadline about why the show is resonating so well. “It’s a 25-year-old game franchise that just keeps getting more and more relevant with the way that it takes on a lot of very serious issues about our society and our deepest fears, but it plays with them in a really fun way and makes it a world that you want to spend time in,” Robertson-Dworet said.
For Wagner's part, he really likes that the Fallout show blurs the line between comedy and drama, which kind of goes to show how award shows are behind the times in splitting up nominations between the two. There's been a lot of talk about The Bear being nominated in Comedy categories despite being grindingly morose and depressing at times. Likewise, Fallout has deadpan surgery robots and Walton Goggins running around in a cowboy outfit, yet it's nominated in the Drama categories. I think the nominating committees assume Fallout is a drama because Amazon spent a lot of money on it and there are action scenes. Neither show fits neatly into this binary.
So while the award ceremony works that out, we get to enjoy the push and pull between comedy and drama onscreen. “I do think the humor is serviced by the drama and the gravitas that are significant,” Wagner said. “We had comedy people working on the show, and Geneva brought in a bunch of drama people working on the show. So both camps fed one another, I think, in a really helpful way."
Walton Goggins is the perfect poster boy for this ambiguity, since he's played a lot of characters who tow the line between comedy and drama, including the Ghoul. “There’s no one who can deliver a more dramatic monologue and say it in a more unexpected way, but there’s also no one funnier,” Robertson-Dworet said.
Fallout gets 16 Emmy nominations, but will probably lose top prize to Shōgun
Fallout is returning for season 2, although we don't have a release date yet. Robertson-Dworet would only say that they're "having a blast with it":
"The crazy thing about making Season 1 is that you have eight hours to adapt a franchise, in which there’s thousands of hours of gameplay to draw from, and it just means that you have to leave so many of your favorite pieces of the mythology behind. So we’re honestly just excited to get to be able to dive deeper into it and show audiences more of this incredible world."
The Fallout series has been kicking around since 1997, so there is indeed a lot of material to draw on. Wagner hinted at plans to keep going well beyond season 2: “We barely scratched the surface of the world of Fallout in Season 1, and it feels like in Season 2 we’re getting another scratch in, but there’s more to be done.”
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