With the release of Season 1 of Prime Video’s Fallout TV series, those who don’t have experience with the games are finding out just how peculiar the world its set in is. While Fallout is set in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse that all but wiped out the majority of the United States of America, it’s not necessarily the USA you’re accustomed to.
Instead, Fallout is set against the backdrop of a nation that never moved on from its penchant for American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States stands tall and proud among other nations.
“The unique challenge of one of things about Fallout that’s so interesting is it’s not our world that ends exactly,” executive producer Jonathan Nolan explained. “It is this different kind of Eisenhower America that never had a Watergate, never had a Vietnam [war], never had a moment of self-reflection, and just kept powering through with nuclear powered toasters, and giant Cadillacs, and all of that.”
Aesthetically, it looks like a United States forever stuck in a retro futuristic version of the 1950s. It’s a version of America that feels so dated that it’s genuinely funny. As co-showrunner Graham Wagner explains it, “I look at Fallout as like, the cinematic universe of duck and cover info videos, extrapolating that world. The uncanny positivity in the face of the apocalypse, which feels quite real.”
He’s not wrong in that many aspects of the setting of Fallout feel born out of old safety videos that ordered you to hide under a school desk in the case of a nuclear attack. Fallout, in that way, is a satirization of that era. However, Wagner also sees how to look at its satirical take on the modern world.
“If we’re in a state of nuclear tension, people will continue to sell products, people will continue tweeting goofy jokes, life as we know it will go on,” he explained. “Even if the bombs fall, I guarantee you, if we have a 20-minute warning, someone’s gonna do a tweet that’s gonna make you laugh. Human nature has a way of, kind of, we don’t suddenly become serious, because that’s not who we are as people.”
(SPOILERS) FALLOUT Stars Break Down the Fight in Filly
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While finding ways to ease your own tension when everything around you seems bad, that’s something humans have done since long before social media. Even nuclear fallout, in particular, has been the subject of comedies and dramas since the 1970s. One of the earliest comedies about life in a post-nuclear war United States was A Boy and His Dog (1975). In it, a young Don Johnson plays a man wandering the Wasteland with his telepathic dog, Blood (who he insultingly refers to as Dogmeat). That film is set in the far off year of 2024, interestingly enough. The movie and the story it’s adapted from not only served as one of the Fallout franchise’s early inspirations, the show also pays tribute to it. In one of the ore-war scenes in the series, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) is seen on a movie poster for A Man and His Dog, one of his many films.
Fallout certainly isn’t the first property to use the setting of a post-nuclear apocalypse United States to explore the sillier side of the end of the world, and it certainly will not be the last. In success, though, it has a chance to tell the longest and most fleshed-out version of that darkly humorous future. Hopefully we will get to see that play out in the years to come. For now, Fallout hasn’t been renewed for a second season.
