Welcome to the wasteland: all the news on Amazon’s Fallout TV series

There’s been a clear shift over Fallout’s second season. While the show started out as a relatively goofy introduction to the postapocalyptic wasteland, one that nailed the vibes of the games perfectly, season 2 has been intent on making the world even bigger. And nowhere was that more clear than in the season finale, in which a number of story threads and characters raced toward what seemed to be some kind of conclusion. Instead, the show left everyone hanging, with the promise that things will get even bigger going forward.

Spoilers to follow for the first two seasons of Fallout.

Move over Squid Game: another bleak fictional world is being turned into competitive reality television. In the midst of season 2 of Fallout, Amazon has announced a new series called Fallout Shelter. According to a casting call, the show will put competitors inside of Fallout’s iconic vaults and then test their survival skills in a re-creation of the postapocalyptic world. Presumably there will be no Deathclaws.

Here’s the official logline:

As we tuck into Fallout season 2, eager to see Amazon bring New Vegas to life, there’s one person who stands out — and not just because of his power armor. Knight Maximus of the Brotherhood of Steel is the most important of Fallout’s three main characters, and I’m glad the new season is finally getting into why.

Each member of the cast represents one of the factions warring over control of the Mojave Desert. The vault dwellers have the doggedly optimistic Lucy (Ella Purnell), the wretches of the wasteland get the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), and the “order at any cost” Brotherhood has Maximus (Aaron Moten). But more than either Lucy or the Ghoul, it’s Maximus’ character across both seasons that best represents the heart of all Fallout storytelling: when society has broken down, do you choose evil or good?

Years often go by between new seasons of big streaming shows — just ask fans of Severance or Stranger Things — but with Fallout the wait hasn’t been so bad. The first season was a welcome surprise when it started streaming last April, managing to capture the series’ distinctly playful take on the end of the world in a live-action show. And now we have season 2 a little over a year later.

One of the big changes this season is that Fallout expands its scope. The story is bigger and more complex; in addition to the fates of the three main characters, the show also explores a number of large-scale conflicts in the wasteland, along with the history of how the world came to be this desolate place to begin with. The complexity means things are a little more serious (and less fun) than season 1, but that also means there’s a lot to talk about this time around.

The most impressive thing about Fallout’s first season was how well it nailed the tone. The games are a mix of grim and goofy, a postapocalyptic story in a bleak world that’s also full of crude jokes and ridiculous characters. It’s a tough balance to get right — too serious and it’s a miserable place to be; too silly and it renders the whole thing meaningless — but the Amazon Prime Video series struck the right balance. It was even accessible to viewers who had never played the games. With the scene-setting out of the way, the show’s second season makes a push to expand Fallout’s world and tackle headier subjects. But in doing so, it loses some of the playfulness that made the series distinct from the many other dystopias you can stream.

Fallout is once again mostly focused on three core characters: Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul, the wasteland’s version of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This time around Lucy (Ella Purnell), a vault dweller, is traveling alongside the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) toward the relative glitz and glamour of New Vegas. Lucy is following her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), hoping to bring him to justice for destroying an entire city. The Ghoul is also after Lucy’s dad because he believes this will lead him to his own missing family. Meanwhile, Maximus (Aaron Moten) has returned to the Brotherhood of Steel as a hero because fellow soldiers all mistakenly believe he killed the leader of their rival, the New California Republic. (If you’re lost right now, Fallout does have very serviceable recaps before each episode to get you up to speed, this in spite of the recent AI fiasco.)

The second season of Fallout is debuting one day earlier than previously announced: the new season will now launch on Tuesday, December 16th at 9PM ET / 6PM PT on Prime Video, Amazon says. The season will have eight episodes that will premiere weekly on Wednesdays (besides this first episode), with the season finale airing on February 4th, 2026.

“The new season of Fallout will pick up in the aftermath of Season One’s epic finale and take audiences along for a journey through the wasteland of the Mojave to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas,” according to Amazon.

Prime Video has released new photos from season two of Fallout. Lucy (Ella Purnell), the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), and Maximus (Aaron Moten) return as a trio of Wasteland Wanderers whose adventures will bring them to the post-apocalyptic playground of New Vegas. Take a look.

Kyle MacLachlan, who plays Lucy’s father Hank, also returns to the show along with Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias), and it looks like there’s more evil afoot in the Vaults (duh!). Season two of Fallout is set to start sometime in December, which feels a long way away, but it is definitely sooner than whenever the next Fallout game will show up.

Get ready for more Fallout. The second season of the hit Prime Video show will premiere in December, and the show has already been renewed for a third, Variety reports.

The second season will “pick up in the aftermath of Season One’s epic finale and take audiences along for a journey through the wasteland of the Mojave to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas,” according to a description included in Variety. Production wrapped on the season last week.

So I’ve decided, after watching Ella Purnell traipse humorously about the wasteland, that I want in on this Fallout thing, too. So where does an aspiring Wastelander, one who has little experience with the series, start? The answer to that is usually “at the beginning,” but I’m gonna focus on Fallout 3 through Fallout 76 because they’re the most popular games, and critically, I have a Game Pass subscription I haven’t used in a while. I spent an hour with each game (not counting the tutorials) to get a feel for which games had the smoothest onboarding experience and most interesting story and initial area.

Fallout 3 is the game I was most familiar with. Initially, I thought I was going to be annoyed with the game’s opening sequence about growing up in Vault 101, but surprisingly, I enjoyed it. I liked talking with my fellow Vault dwellers, hitting on my friend Amata, and realizing way too late that Wordle is just a more complex version of the computer-hacking mini-game.

For production designer Howard Cummings, Fallout wasn’t just the name of his most recent project — it also became a verb. As he was working on Amazon’s live-action adaptation of the game series, Cummings and his team used the word Fallout as a shorthand to describe the particular retrofuturistic, post-apocalyptic style the franchise is known for. “Everything had to be Fallout-ed,” he tells The Verge. “For locations, I’d say: ‘How do I Fallout this grocery store?’”

Initially, though, that wasn’t the plan. Going into the project, Cummings — who previously worked on shows like Westworld and Lovecraft Country — didn’t know all that much about the games and thought he might have to update the visual style to make it “slicker.” That changed once he did some research. After watching YouTube videos of fans building their own vaults and Pip-Boys and scouring wikis for every detail he could find, Cummings says he became enchanted by the franchise’s mix of playful and dark. “The script was actually so well-written to the game that we decided that we should absolutely do it like the game,” he explains. “Nobody ever told me to do that, which was kind of great. I did it because I really liked it.”

Just a week after the show first premiered, Amazon has confirmed that there’s more of its live-action Fallout series on the way. As of now there are no details available other than the fact that the show has been renewed for season 2.

While there are no specific numbers about how well the show has done on Prime Video, Amazon says that “in its first four days, the high-octane fueled series has become a hit with its global audience, ranking among the service’s top three most-watched titles ever and the most-watched season globally since Rings of Power.” The aforementioned Lord of the Rings show premiered back in 2022.

The new Amazon adaptation of Fallout is excellent, nailing the goofy yet grim vibe of the series, all while telling a new story. It’s so good, in fact, that after the eight episodes were over, I was left with a strong urge to head back into the wasteland. But where to start? An open-world RPG like Fallout 4 felt like too much of a commitment (even with a next-gen update on the way), so I turned to something simpler: the mobile strategy game Fallout Shelter. And now I can’t seem to stop.

Now, to be clear, Fallout Shelter isn’t a new game. It launched in 2015, and while it started as a mobile release, it’s been subsequently ported to PC and consoles. It’s a bit like a city-builder, just one that takes place mostly underground. You’re the Overseer — a kind of postapocalyptic mayor figure — tasked with not only managing a vault but also expanding it. You’ll have to keep track of the happiness of residents, while ensuring a steady supply of food, water, and electricity. You’ll dig underground to add new dwellings and facilities and fend off attacks from raiders and radroaches. Eventually, you can build things like a radio studio to lure new residents from the surface and go out on quests that play out like very simple dungeon-crawling RPGs.

Bethesda has smartly guessed that with the arrival of the new Fallout series from Amazon, folks are going get curious about all the Fallout games. In addition to making Fallout 3 and Fallout 76 available on Amazon Luna and updating Fallout Shelter to include a bunch of characters from the show, Bethesda has announced that Fallout 4 will get a next-gen update.

Fallout 4 will get performance and quality mode settings on the PS5 and Xbox Series X / S, while PC players get wide and ultra-widescreen support, along with quest updates and Steam Deck verification. The Epic Games Store is also adding the game to its storefront. There’s a new Enclave questline coming with the update, complete with new weapons and armor. Best yet, it’s all free. Check out the details here.

It’s hard to say what, precisely, makes a design timeless. Some classic gadgets are simply beautiful, while others remain functional years after they come out. The list of truly timeless products in tech is small, but there’s one name that looms large: RobCo Industries’ Pip-Boy. Sure, it’s relatively simple, and some of its features only work if you’re stuck underground. But when a design hasn’t changed for 200 years, you know it’s doing something right.

For those who have been living under an irradiated rock, a Pip-Boy is a wrist-worn computer that — despite originally being meant for the pre-war world and, later, life inside of a Vault-Tec vault — has become an indispensable tool for survival out in the wasteland. It’s large and rugged, though not particularly heavy or uncomfortable, and is outfitted with plenty of satisfyingly chunky dials and buttons. From an aesthetic perspective, it’s surprisingly versatile, pairing with everything from a Vault-Tec jumpsuit to raider armor. You never really have to worry about when and where it’s okay to wear one.

In making successful video game adaptations, it feels more important to strike the right tone rather than follow the source material to the letter. “Tone” in Fallout is Walton Goggins’ whiskey-soaked cowboy drawl ripped straight from the age of Gary Cooper and John Wayne extolling the virtues of bucolic Vault-Tec living with a sign that says “Test Subjects” just a touch off-screen.

In other words: perfection.

Fallout is a mixture of contradictions. In one moment, the games are dark and gruesome; in the next, silly and playful. So when it came time to adapt the series into a streaming show on Amazon, nailing that eclectic tone was key. “I think it’s very fundamental to what Fallout is,” says series co-creator and showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet, “this mix of weird comedy and drama and violence and really compelling moral dilemmas.”

Unlike other video game adaptations like The Last of Us, Amazon’s Fallout isn’t a direct translation of an existing story. Instead, it takes place in its own corner of the universe. It’s set in Los Angeles, more than two centuries after the nuclear detonation that rendered America a wasteland, which gave the creators some freedom for approaching the challenge of Fallout’s varied tones. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the story is shown through three main characters with very different perspectives.

Fallout’s TV adaptation is coming to Prime Video a day early. The new series will now make its debut on Wednesday, April 10th, 2024, at 9PM ET / 6PM PT, rather than on April 11th.

Walton Goggins, who plays nuclear wasteland survivor The Ghoul, made the announcement on Monday, saying the early premiere comes as a “thank-you” to fans. All eight episodes will appear on the platform at the same time, so you might have to restrain yourself from watching them all in one go.