Nolan tasked Fallout showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet with threading that exact needle. The pair selected to heart the collection round three protagonists, performed by Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, and Aaron Clifton Moten, all of whom enter the story at a turning level of their lives. As a cowboy film star turned ghoul, Goggins’ character is chilly and lawless, a set of feelings you must think about stems from the loss he’s felt within the 219 years for the reason that first bombs fell. Moten is Maximus, a former orphan who joins up with the paramilitary tech protectors within the Brotherhood of Steel and stumbles his method into an opportunity at greatness. Purnell is Lucy MacLean, a naive Vault Dweller who units off into the Wasteland in pursuit of her kidnapped father (Kyle MacLachlan).

“All of the dilemmas the Brotherhood of Steel has faced over the years, the sort of quagmire of it all and the different angles they’ve taken, that’s all interesting,” Wagner says. “In most of the Fallout games, you start as a Vault Dweller, so that made total sense since, with the series, you start in a very small space and get to explore a crazy new world just like they are.”

The showrunners additionally made certain to incorporate The Ghoul, an unplayable character within the video games. “That just felt like something we all wanted to see, because they’re sort of the untouchables of the Fallout world,” Wagner says.

As a property, Fallout has all the time performed with a kind of gallows humor, a satirical tackle how terrible and complex life might be after whole nuclear annihilation. That’s actually true with the collection, which balances heart-wrenching kid-delivered dialog about encroaching mushroom clouds with “aw, shucks” intercourse jokes and an virtually comical quantity of carnage. Wagner says setting the collection’ tone was a little bit of a tightrope act, since they knew it needed to be somewhat bonkers generally and, at different occasions, lethal critical.

“We did edits of episodes where there were long stretches without comedy because that was what we felt like the story needed, and it was just like, ‘Gosh, that’s a lot of apocalypse,’” he jokes. “We wanted to make the apocalypse a place we all wanted to go to.”

For some viewers, although, it’d really feel like 2024 is already apocalypse-adjacent, making among the present’s references and eventualities appear all too prescient. That’s all coincidental, Nolan says, for the reason that present entered growth in 2019, pre-Covid, earlier than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and previous to renewed hostilities within the Middle East. Still, he provides, making the collection “always felt like an opportunity to poke a finger into a bit of an open wound for humanity, which is the fact that we still haven’t figured out if we’re going to make it or if we’re going to blow ourselves to smithereens.”

Humanity, Wagner says, is sort of all the time in its “end is nigh” period. The apocalypse is a relative idea. For some folks, the apocalypse occurred when girls obtained jobs or began sporting pants. “The world is constantly in a state of ending, and we’re constantly talking about it,” he says. “We’re all just narcissists who think we’re going to be there when the final curtain goes down.”

Presuming the world doesn’t end any time soon, though, Nolan says that the Fallout team does have a plan in place for where they want the show to go, if they’re lucky enough to get a second season.

“In television, though,” Nolan says, “you have to be careful not to leave too much down the road,” something he knows all too well as the creator of HBO’s beloved-then-canceled Westworld. “We just want to concentrate on making one great season of television. If it works well and there’s an opportunity to go again, I very much hope we get that chance.”