Prime Video has just added one of 2024’s biggest and best shows

Stephen Porzio

All the episodes of the sci-fi action Western series are available to watch now.

Prime Video’s big budget TV version of the popular video game series Fallout has finally landed on the streaming service and we’re happy to report that it joins The Last of Us in that rare category of highly successful game-to-screen adaptations.

After a scary yet stunning opening sequence in which we witness a nuclear bomb falling on Hollywood from the vantage point of a child’s birthday party, we jump forward 219 years to meet Lucy (Ella Purnell), a young woman living in a fallout bunker with her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) and their community of survivors.

As part of efforts to repopulate the Earth, Lucy is assigned to marry a young man from a neighbouring bunker – something she is very excited about.

However, after a truly disastrous wedding reception – we’d say it’s the worst wedding in TV since the famous Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones – Lucy is compelled to venture out into the irradiated hellscape on the surface.

There, she finds waiting for her an unfamiliar, strange and violent world populated with eccentric characters.

These include a former Western star that has been transformed into a mutated gunslinging bounty hunter dubbed The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), as well as a young squire of the militaristic cultish group The Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus (Aaron Moten).

Executively produced and partly directed by Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Westworld) – whose brother explored similar themes in his recent Oscar-winning movie Oppenheimer – Fallout effortlessly navigates a tricky tone.

It serves as an emotional, harrowing and cautionary tale about mankind destroying the Earth and the struggle to retain ones humanity amidst the apocalypse, while also being filled with genuine humour and inventively splattery action and violence.

Helping to establish this tone is the show’s marvellous aesthetic. Akin to the games, the fallout shelters themselves feel like they come from a future as imagined in the 1950s.

These interiors are coolly juxtaposed with the barren but gorgeous Western-like vistas of a bombed out America, filled with strange pockets of life that have sprung up in the wake of the Great War – perhaps best exemplified by the dog-sized cockroaches that roam this new United States.

Having already watched four of Fallout’s eight episodes, the series’ universally great performances and compelling, ever-twisting plot has left us at JOE dying to complete the show. Who knew the end of the world could be so fun?