Prime Video’s ‘Fallout’ launches into the post-apocalyptic TV frontier (video)

Gamers who’ve grown up wandering the irradiated wastelands of Bethesda Softworks’ “Fallout” video game franchise since it first launched back in 1997 are popping open warm flat cans of Nuka-Cola to celebrate the impending arrival of Prime Video‘s live-action adaptation of the retro-futuristic survival classic.

According to official “Fallout” lore, World War III erupts on Oct. 23, 2077 with an atomic hailstorm of thermonuclear devices that immediately devastates the United States’ major cities. This apocalyptic event forces civilians into networks of special underground vaults or out into the radioactive aftermath where post-apocalyptic humans struggle to stay alive amid the horror.

Prime Video’s “Fallout” arrives on April 10, from creators/writers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (“Interstellar,” “Westworld”) for an eight-episode rookie season packed with Pip-Boys, Vault-Tec shelters, ghouls, gulpers, Gauss rifles, Yao Guai (mutated bears), and the Brotherhood of Steel marching in their T-60 power armor some two centuries after the Great War. It stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Walton Goggins, Moises Arias, Johnny Pemberton, and Kyle MacLachlan.

Here’s the series’ full synopsis:

“Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, ‘Fallout’ is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.”

From the looks of the radical trailers and new behind-the-scenes clips already dispersed into the world, it appears that Nolan and Joy have preserved “Fallout’s” intriguing cocktail of atompunk design, surreal satire, nuclear nightmares, gallows humor, and heroic adventure in their careful translation to the small screen for discriminating gamers and fans to dissect.

“You don’t want it to feel dour,” Nolan told THR regarding the series’ tone. “But the guide was the games. When I sat down with ‘Fallout 3,’ taking a break from writing, I was burned out. I had no idea what to expect. The sense of humor and irony and the cutting level of satire and this depiction of an Eisenhower-era America that never lost its swagger and kept lumbering forward … it just had a unique tone. It’s political. It has a crazy point of view, and it’s crazy violent.”

This ambitious sci-fi series is executive produced by Nolan and Joy’s Kilter Films, in partnership with Bethesda Softworks and Bethesda Game Studios. Kilter Films’ Athena Wickham, Bethesda Softworks’ James Altman, and Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard will be involved as the show’s executive producers. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner serve as showrunners.