Amazon's Fallout TV Series Will Tackle Modern Politics Using The M*A*S*H Approach
Now that the age of superheroes is ending, video game adaptations are the new cinematic frontier. We've seen TV adaptations like "Arcane" and "The Last of Us" receive critical acclaim, while big-screen adaptations like the "Sonic the Hedgehog" movies have proved to be huge commercial hits. The next highly anticipated TV adaptation of a beloved video game franchise is "Fallout," co-created Geneva Robertson-Dworet ("Tomb Raider") and Graham Wagner ("Portlandia"), who also serve as showrunners.
"Fallout" takes place in 2296, 219 years after a great nuclear war that annihilated mankind. The survivors took refuge in underground bunkers known as Vaults. Those who leave the vaults encounter a dangerously hostile and brutal wasteland that, despite some elements of advanced technology, retains the aesthetics of 1950s Americana. It's a retrofuturistic story set hundreds of years in the future, featuring mutated monsters and intelligent (and somehow hot) ghouls. But to bring the heart of the show back to present day worries, the creators of "Fallout" looked to an iconic TV show about war and comedy: "M*A*S*H."
"Just as 'M*A*S*H' gets to talk about Vietnam through the lens of the Korean War, we get to talk about the mess we're in now through the lens of ... 'What if everybody just gets on with it and destroys the f***ing world?'" Nolan explained to Empire magazine, summing up the video game adaptation as "what happens when you outsource the survival of the human race." In the 1970s, the writers of "M*A*S*H" could draw on news headlines about the Vietnam War for inspiration, and Wagner says that "Fallout" was also developed against an eerily relevant backdrop:
"We were developing the show right when Covid started, and the parallels between ourselves and the vault-dwellers were not lost on us. We're sitting at home having our groceries delivered and being like, 'We're heroes!' while others were putting themselves in danger to serve us."
When timeless becomes timely
When "M*A*S*H" came out, the still-ongoing Vietnam War was a sensitive subject that was difficult to directly critique. But while the 1970 film and subsequent TV show were both set during the Korean War, often referred to as "the forgotten war," that setting was a kind of Trojan horse for addressing the grim realities of the Vietnam War.
Likewise, the "Fallout" games barely ever mention the Republican or Democrat parties or even many real-life 20th-century figures, and they don't need to. The games are still very openly talking about contemporary issues, sharply satirizing American consumerism and nationalism — while still featuring shadow organizations and soldiers in mecha suits. In the games, pollution, environmental disruption, and the horrors of capitalism are shown to do more damage than any mutated monster. And the comedy lies in how extreme these rather depressing subjects are taken. Thankfully, it seems both aspects made it to the TV show.
"Graham once summed up [the tone] to me as Tarkovsky with jokes," Nolan said. This is a nightmarish world where every day is hell itself, where everyone wears a mini-computer with a cartoon boy with a huge smile that tells you when you're near death, so why not laugh along? At the very least, Walton Goggins' ghoul character understands this, as Wagner describes the character as being a former "singing cowboy" who becomes "ur-nihilist" in the wasteland.
"Fallout" premieres April 12, 2024, on Prime Video.