If the Fallout TV show wants to succeed, it needs to lean into the games' trademark cynical humor

Dec. 1, 2023

To stand out, the Fallout series must embrace the games' beloved cartoonish aspects

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Todd Howard - a man who is equal parts Bethesda Studios director, open world gaming evangelist, and meme -has said that the show willbe “dark” but also have a “bit of a wink to it”.  This is good news! In order to stick out amidst a modern wave of grueling dystopian television like The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, The Handmaid’s Tale - amongst many others - Fallout needs to take advantage of its innate strengths. And leaning into its trademark sardonic humor is a great way to make that happen – in fact, the farther the better.

Because while Fallout is about a world brought to (and beyond) the apocalypse by war, mankind’s immortal hubris, and, ya know, tons of bombs, it also approaches the armageddon rather cheekily. Characters are intensely quirky and often defined by their unique, ridiculous obsessions to the extent that even though a Fallout game is distinctly player-driven (meaning that they can choose to dig through every detail or blaze through with little thought to personalities or story beats) it’s hard to come away without at least grasping some of the intended humor. Even the dead, whose past lives and stories are revealed through Holotapes, tend to be illustrated through their own wild compulsions. That those compulsions are often the thing that led to their gruesome, ironic deaths is just another layer of dark comedy.

A menagerie of beasts and brutes

Unlike many of its peer franchises, which choose to decorate their post-human annihilation with a specific creature (usually zombies), Fallout is a sci-fi free-for-all. There are crazed robots, giant bugs, psychopathic raiders, super mutants and, most infamous of all, the rampaging Deathclaws. Fallout combines the Mad Max formula of the wandering anti-hero with a bestiary’s worth of fantastical nightmare critters, making it a delight to investigate and, quite honestly, also die in. For even in the frustration of death, it’s hard to not think: “Whoa, did I just get decapitated by a giant lobster queen? That’s kinda rad.”

Obviously, the extent of the menagerie of beasts and brutes that we’ll see in the Fallout series will be mostly decided by the budget, but that “wink” will feel incomplete without the chaotic approach to local wildlife and the haphazard futuristic things that exist alongside them. Fallout games relish in their assortment of oddities and while a television narrative will likely use its time to build to reveals (for instance, if the Deathclaw shows up, it’s likely to come with a bit of suspense rather than Fallout’s trademark surprise assaults), it still has a chance to unleash a nuclear zoo on us.

Fallout arrives with many expectations attached to it – with the early shots of thePower Armorsand Walton Goggins’ noseless Ghoul, its audience will likely spend the months leading up to its release (and the months after too) sifting through to see how it connects to the games. Howard also mentioned that, while it takes place in the universe of the games, it’s not directly based on any of them. And that’s probably the best way to go about something like Fallout.

That’s because if treated right, the games can provide a wonderful template for new stories and outlandish sojourns into what’s left of our atomic world. However, this also means taking the beloved, cartoonish aspects and applying them. Because without those, a Fallout series is little more than “The Last of Us, but dustier”. And what’s the fun in that?

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Daniel Dockery is a writer for places like Crunchyroll, Polygon, Vulture, WIRED and Paste Magazine. His debut book,Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught A Generation To Catch Them All, is available wherever books are sold.

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