Fallout, season 1

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Although Fallout is based on a successful series of role-playing video games (the first one launched in 1997), no prior knowledge of the franchise is necessary to watch the highly enjoyable TV adaptation of the same name. Set within the same narrative continuity but based on an original story, the series takes place (mostly) in the post-apocalyptic year 2296 (farther than any of the games has reached so far), 219 years after a nuclear war wiped out most of humanity. The plot follows three different protagonists as they amble along the customary radioactive, mutant-infested wasteland, each on a quest for the same gruesome object—a severed head—which holds a mysterious secret and will be the opportunity for them to cross paths. 

Since their ascension to prominence in the late 1960s, post-apocalyptic narratives have become a fully-fledged genre in their own right, with literally hundreds of films and TV series (not least of which 2023’s The Last of Us, also based on a video game) released since 2020 alone (the pandemic might have helped boost the genre, although it hardly needed the encouragement). Despite this crowded context, Fallout manages to feel both different and fresh, notably because of its self-reflective nature as well as its highly unsettling tonal shifts. The show’s trademark might in fact be the way it unexpectedly veers from poignant character drama to sardonic comedy to surrealistic, slow-motion musical flourishes, sometimes within the same scene, as exemplified in the opening of the first episode.

The presence of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the brains behind Westworld, as executive producers (and as the director of the first three episodes in the former’s case), partly explains both the tone and the metafictional nature of the show, along with its complex network of storylines weaving interrelated stories across differing timelines. Like Westworld, the TV adaptation borrows heavily from both science fiction and the Western genres (with ghouls and zombies for good measure), and like them and much of Nolan and Joy’s work, it interrogates, in a macabre but highly entertaining manner, the nature of our relationship to science, technology and utopianism.

A series of flashbacks interspersed in each of the eight episodes of season one brings us back to a uchronic 21^st century society that looks a lot like a retrofuturistic 1950s America. This is the show’s main opportunity to give full expression to its satirical take on “the American Way of Life,” as a Clint Eastwood-like Western actor is hired by a major conglomerate for their latest advertising campaign. The (soon to be revealed evil) corporation is selling fallout shelters designed as self-enclosed micro-societies (projects that were actually proposed in the 1950s and 1960s) in which its customers can survive and thrive when the nuclear Armageddon inevitably occurs.

What Fallout builds from this premise is a thoughtful commentary not so much on the evils of capitalism (“the spirit of competition” is equated to corporate-friendly Social Darwinism) but on the nature of technological utopianism. As described by Howard P. Segal in his classic study of this ideology, technological utopianism consists of “the belief in the inevitability of progress and in progress precisely as technological progress […] equat[ing] advancing technology with utopia itself” (Segal, p. 1). The essentially capitalistic and consumerist nature of such a belief is slowly deconstructed by the show, which implicitly contrasts the marketing cant of the pre-apocalyptic past (the show uses witty parodies of 1950s TV ads in the same way as the game) with the reality of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland and its ruined billboards. Typically for the genre, utopian intentions are equated with murderous results and with the advent of elitist underground communities masquerading as subterranean utopias (a staple of the genre since the 1970s).

One of the protagonists, Lucy McLean (Ella Purnell), lives in such a sheltered community, Vault 33, a community governed by scientists where homely, uniformed dwellers’ belief in science, technology and the need “to keep the candle of civilization lit” makes them feel straight out of a Gene Roddenberry TV series (including the post-apocalyptic show he tried to produce in the early 1970s, Genesis II). But because this is 2024, the association of technology and the need to create “the perfect conditions for humanity”, as another character puts it, is a strongly ironic one that
can only foreshadow disaster.

This is also made clear by the visual association of the shelter with a typical suburban community, where conformity and a naïve belief in science and progress prevail. Likewise, the camera often films the characters in front of retro-looking propaganda posters, while their ideal pastoral world is soon revealed to be an image screened from a video projector. The series is full of such ideas, inviting audiences to make sense of its deconstruction of techno-utopianism on their own. 

The fact that this clanky subterranean world is so close to yet another recent post-apocalyptic TV show, 2023’s Silo, again shows how omnipresent the genre and its themes have become in cinema and on television. But few TV series have managed to offer such an ambitious, thoughtful and hilarious reimagining of the genre as Fallout. The series, which has been renewed for a second season, offers fascinating avenues to study the popularity of post-apocalyptic narratives (and their evolution since the 1960s), the combination of different genres (including the so-called Weird Western) as well as the treatment of nuclear-age techno-utopianism—or utopianism in general—
in our anti-utopian times. The future of the post-apocalypse has never looked (radioactively) brighter.

Mehdi Achouche is an Associate Professor in Anglophone Film and TV Studies at Sorbonne Paris Nord University. He works on the representations of techno-utopianism, transhumanism and ideologies of progress in science fiction films and TV series. He is currently working on a monograph on such representations in films and series from the 1960s and 1970s.