Should fans be worried that Amazon is dropping all eight episodes of Fallout at once?

Today, Amazon Prime Video dropped a full trailer for its new show Fallout, based on the popular video game series of the same name. The show will follows Lucy (Ella Purnell), a young woman who has lived a sheltered, pleasant life in an underground vault but who now must venture into the outside world: an apocalyptic Wasteland that never recovered from a nuclear disaster generations before. Like the Fallout games, the show is bleak but funny, dramatic yet goofy. Watch the trailer below:

Probably the most surprising thing about the trailer is the reveal that all eight episodes of Fallout are coming out on April 11. Of course, streaming services releasing every episode of a new season of TV all at once is nothing new; Netflix did it back in 2013 with its first-ever original TV series, House of Cards, and much of the streaming world followed suit. But Amazon isn't Netflix, and generally has released episodes one at a time. That has been true for most of its biggest hit shows, including The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Boys, Invincible and Reacher.

True, sometimes Amazon will drop two or three episodes at the very top of the season so viewers have something to sink their teeth into, but after that, episodes come out at a rate of one per week, which makes sense; the longer new episdoes are coming out, the more chances people have to talk about the show amongst themselves, in person and on social media. Releasing seasons of television over a period of weeks or months allows the shows to build buzz, which the studios can then use to drive sales of subscriptions and merchandise.

So why is it releasing every episode of Fallout season 1 all at once? Well, it might just be because Amazon thinks the episodes will work best that way. But the decision sets off some alarm bells, because another possibility is that the executives think the Fallout show is bad, so it wants to dump all the episodes quickly so people will mock and then quickly forget about them.

Consider what Disney did with the Marvel show Echo, a middling series that got so-so reviews when all five episodes dropped on Disney+ earlier this year. Like Amazon, Disney usually releases new episodes of a TV series at a rate of one per week. But in the case of Echo, it may have known that it had something of a lukewarm potato on its hands, and figured it would be better for the brand if the series quietly came and went.

Conversely, no studio wants to suffer through what HBO suffered when it ran The Idol, a cringey sexual drama from Euphoria creator Sam Levinson, at a rate of one episode per week in the summer of 2023. The show was savaged week in week out by critics, prolonging the pain.

Again, we don't know how Amazon feels about the Fallout show. Maybe it's brilliant. Maybe there's a good reason for releasing all eight episodes at once that has nothing to do with unloading a series Amazon knows to be sub-par. But it has me a bit worried. We'll find out whether those worries are borne out on April 11.

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