There are a million reasons Fallout shouldn’t work. For starters, it’s a video-game adaptation, and those almost never work regardless. It’s an over-the-top satire of capitalism and the fantasy of the American West, a subgenre with a pretty shabby success rate on the small screen. It ricochets between a dizzying array of reference points and emotional tones every episode. It treats violence both as a hideous moral blight and totally awesome.
It shouldn’t work, but it does. Adapted by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner from the games created by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, Josh Sawyer, and others, Fallout is a spectacularly savage send-up of megalomaniacal technocrats, billionaire psychopaths, and American fascists. (Brought to you by Jeff Bezos and all your friends at Amazon!) Starring several of the most telegenic actors working today, it’s stupid like a fox, smarter than it needs to be, and so nasty I’m surprised they can get away with it.
I reviewed the series premiere of Fallout for Decider. Woo!
Tags: decider, fallout, TV, TV reviews