Will the Fallout TV Series Radiate the Tone of the Video Games?
Variety, Deadline, and the Hollywood Reporter all shared the news, with THR including this statement from Amazon MGM Studios head Jennifer Salke: “Jonah [Nolan, co-producer], Lisa [Joy, co-producer], Geneva [Robertson-Dworet, co-showrunner and writer], and Graham [Wagner, co-showrunner and writer] have captivated the world with this ground-breaking, wild ride of a show. The bar was high for lovers of this iconic video game and so far we seem to have exceeded their expectations, while bringing in millions of new fans to the franchise … We are thrilled to announce season two after only one week out and take viewers even farther into the surreal world of Fallout.”
The renewal confirmation comes on the heels of reports in Variety and elsewhere that season two will film in California to take advantage of $25 million in tax credits—a shift that will definitely add fuel to speculation that the show could continue its adventures in New Vegas, as seen in the games.
THR also has a quote from Nolan and Joy, whose previous sci-fi projects include the prematurely cancelled Westworld: “Praise be to our insanely brilliant showrunners, Geneva and Graham, to our kick-ass cast, to Todd and James and all the legends at Bethesda, and to Jen, Vernon, and the amazing team at Amazon for their incredible support of this show. We can’t wait to blow up the world all over again.”
Adapting any well-known property is always going to be a big feat, especially when it comes to video games. It’s one thing to adapt a comic or TV show, it’s another thing to adapt a series of games, which come with a greater degree of self-expression. You can please some fans, but you can’t please all of the fans, as we’ve seen with basically every game-to-TV/film adaptation within the last five years.
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Talking to T3, Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan said as such about the upcoming Fallout show. Like many, he came into the series with Fallout 3 all the way back in 2008, which he said consumed roughly a year of his life back in the day. At the time, he would’ve been working on quite a few projects, and he was frank in saying the RPG “almost derailed my entire career.” Fallout fans have been divided on the series for some time (see early reactions to Fallout 76), and Nolan similarly it was impossible for the show to please the whole community.
“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said. “You’ve got to make yourself happy.” with Fallout, he continued, was for everyone to “come into this trying to make the show that you want to make.” Considering previous interviews, it doesn’t sound like this show is going to wildly diverge from those games, but they are going to have their own spin on series staples that’ll likely rankle longtime lovers. Between this and his Batman work, he called it a “rare and unbelievable thing…to take something that you love and get a chance to play in that universe, to create your own version.”
No doubt he’d like for it to be a big multi-season hit like Westworld and Person of Interest, but he sounded honest in saying he was “very happy” with how this series has turned out. We’ll find out whether he should be happy when all eight episodes of Fallout will hit Prime Video on April 11.
This past January, HBO canceledOur Flag Means Death after the show’s second season premiered (and wrapped) in October. As with most cancled shows, a fan campaign emerged to try and get HBO to renew the show, while creator David Jenkins said he’d try his best to shop the show around somewhere else that’d be open to a comedy about gay pirates.
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But those dreams are now over, as Jenkins revealed on Instagram the show wouldn’t be picked up at another network or streamer. “We’ve reached the end of the road, at least as far as this sweet show is concerned,” he wrote. “After many complimentary meetings, conversations, etc., it seems there is no alternate home for our crew.” Jenkins went on to thank their fans for their efforts, which were “noticed across the industry”—they’d fundraised enough money for billboards in New York and London, which he says went a ways in helping the cast and crew “deal with the loss.”
“A love like ours can’t disappear in an instant,” he concluded. “When we see each other off in mystic, say hello. We won’t say goodbye, because we’re not leaving. We’re just taking a breather until next time we can share something together.”
Our Flag Means Death was just the latest cancellation in a decent-sized streak from HBO. Along with the likes of Rap Sh!t and The Flight Attendant, the network binned Westworldafter four seasons, in a move that came a surprise to that show’s cast and crew, given it was ready to close things out with season five. Its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has been on a tear this week—media company Rooster Teeth is being shut down, while it’s preparing to delist titles published by Adult Swim Games, and reportedly refusing to just transfer Steam publishing rights over to those individuals.
Amazon recently revealed that its Fallout TV show will begin streaming in 2024 by tweeting a 1950s-looking postcard from Los Angeles, California with Vault Boy giving the thumbs up. Upon closer inspection, fans have noticed a lot of weird anomalies that have some thinking it might actually be AI-generated.
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At first I paid the image no mind. It was tweeted out on August 23 while a teaser for the show debuted for attendees at Gamescom 2023. Then I saw this tweet by a developer who goes by “Kenney” and makes free game assets. “Amazon ($514 billion dollar in revenue) is incapable of hiring an actual artist,” they wrote. The tweet’s replies were filled with observations of strange wrinkles in the art that make it seem an awful lot like AI may have had a hand in making it, or at least someone who’s very sloppy with Photoshop.
First, there’s the palm tree in front of the yellow building that’s clearly disjointed.
Image: Bethesda / Amazon / Kotaku
Then there’s the woman’s legs on the left. She has three of them and one disappears into some white flowers.
Image: Bethesda / Amazon / Kotaku
The red taxi near the front is all backwards. The headlights and hood are in the rear, while the driving wheel is in the front.
Image: Bethesda / Amazon
The central boulevard with the pedestrians is also confusing. The sidewalk is as wide as the street, and then there are cars on the other side of it that are going in the same direction.
Image: Bethesda / Amazon / Kotaku
Plus, as you go further into the background, the cars get messier and messier, and appear to just be alternating patterns of blue and red like they were stacked on top of one another and then stretched into the horizon.
Image: Bethesda / Amazon
It’s not hard to find other suspicious deficiencies, too.
“I’ve been staring at this picture for quite a while and still people find new weird stuff,” Kenney tweeted. “Also there’s still people saying it’s not AI…” Even if it’s not AI it’s still not great. To Kenney’s original point, it reeks of a company cheaping out instead of paying talented people to do what they’re good at.
“It’s a shame that Amazon took the cheapest route by generating the artwork without even taking the time to do any sort of quality control,” Kenney commented to Kotaku. “I’m sure a lot of artists would’ve absolutely loved the opportunity to do the art for this. There’s a long history of film and TV adaptations that didn’t pay enough respect to their source material, but I think generating art using AI is the most disrespectful thing that could be done. It’s the lowest of effort, it’s literally not doing any effort.”
Amazon and Bethesda did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Fallout TV show is being led by Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan, and wrapped up filming earlier this year. While the promotional art references Los Angeles and Vault 33, little else is known about the series, which was previously confirmed to be separate from the main storyline of the hit post-apocalyptic open-world RPG series. After watching the recent closed-doors teaser, IGN wrote, “While we only had a very small look at the show, it’s clear that the production values are high, with the visual effects looking impressive.”
Even more bizarre, then, that the first official art delivers the opposite impression. The timing also couldn’t be worse. Hollywood writers and actors are both on strike right now over streaming royalties and concerns about the use of AI in filmmaking, including by Amazon. The Writers Guild of America blasted the company along with the other streaming giants in a recent report, accusing them of anti-competitive mergers and vertical integrations. These historic strikes passed the 100-day mark earlier this month.
Many television shows take at least one season — in some cases, a few seasons — to truly hit their stride. It takes time to figure out what works, and what doesn’t. That first season is so crucial in establishing the series’ tone, pacing, and character relationships. As the show progresses, the hope is that each season will top the last. Every now and then, a series debuts with a phenomenal first season that gains attention right out of the gate. But that doesn’t mean it’s built to last — knowing when to end a series is an art within itself.
While there are some amazing TV shows that ended much too soon, there are others that overstayed their welcome on our screens. What’s more, there are even some series that would have probably been better off ending after Season 1. The past few years have shown us that an expertly crafted limited series can dominate the TV conversation just as much as an ongoing one. From Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit to Disney+’s WandaVision, there’s something powerful about a show that leaves its audience wanting more. But, there’s often pressure from studios to churn out more of a hit title, even if it wasn’t intended to be an ongoing series in the first place.
That’s how we end up with once brilliant shows that run past their expiration dates, with later seasons merely reminding viewers how good they used to be. While some stories are too complex to be reduced to a single season of television, others actually might have benefitted from a more concise structure. Here are ten TV shows that probably should have wrapped things up after their first season.
TV Shows That Should Have Ended After One Season
These shows had incredible first seasons followed by disappointing ones. Maybe they should have just ended after one season in the first place?
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Welcome toAlways Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Zahn McClarnon revisits his life across dozens of TV shows—leading to two of his biggest showcases yet, in Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs.
If three makes a trend, then how lucky are we to live in the time of the Zahn McClarnon Episode. The Denver-born actor has been a mainstay on the small screen ever since he moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s, but only recently did prestige TV seem to figure out just how good he was.
We can give some credit to Noah Hawley, who cast him for Fargo’s second season in an initially small role that turned pivotal at the story’s bloody climax. A few years later, McClarnon started recurring on Westworld before pulling off career-best work in his stunning season two showcase, “Kiksuya,” bringing knowledge of his Lakota heritage to the rich portrait of his mysterious character, Akecheta. This TV season then completed the trifecta in Reservation Dogs’ surrealist spectacular “This Is Where the Plot Thickens,” in which McClarnon’s Lighthorseman Big goes on a hell of a psychedelic trip.
“I’ve been on cloud nine for the last decade,” McClarnon tells me over Zoom, that iconic, evocative face of the small screen sneaking in a grin.
And that aforementioned trio doesn’t even take into account the biggest career leap McClarnon has taken of late: His first lead role, in AMC’s Dark Winds. The psychological thriller smartly embraces conventions of the cop drama while forging its own path in its focus on two Navajo police officers (McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon) investigating a murder in the ’70s Southwest. Putting a fresh spin on classic genre fare, the show is a great metaphor for how a perennial, oft underused scene-stealer has enhanced popular shows for decades. With pretty much every gripping hour of Dark Winds operating as its own kind of Zahn McClarnon Episode, it’s also the ultimate example of what happens when a Hollywood journeyman finally gets his due.
Dark Winds.
By Michael Moriatis/Stalwart Productions/AMC.
When McClarnon moved to Los Angeles, more than 30 years ago, he synced up with the American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts—a collective of Native American actors from tribes all over the country who’d meet up at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, go out on the same auditions, and lift each other up through disappointments and breakthroughs. McClarnon arrived with nearly nothing in his pockets; the roles for people who looked like him were limited, and of what was available, even less unique. “But immediately, because there’s such a small pool of Native talent, it wasn’t like I was going up against 150 people at an audition,” he says. “It was more like a half a dozen or a dozen depending on the age range…it wasn’t as tough as I think most people had [it]. I wasn’t going up against the Tom Cruises.”
For better and for worse, McClarnon filled a Hollywood niche. “I got typecast right away,” he says. “It was usually the bad kid or the gangbanger.” But he found some unusual opportunity within that. In 1992, he won a lead role in the Baywatch episode “Showdown at Malibu Beach High,” playing an activist student at the school where Pamela Anderson’s C.J. has just accepted a position, and which is planning to sell off sacred land. He says it was actually a backdoor pilot meant to spin off into a Malibu High series vehicle for Anderson, who’d joined Baywatch that season, but didn’t move forward.
The episode still marked a turning point. A few years later, McClarnon booked a recurring role on the Old West–set Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as Walks on Cloud, the son of Cloud Dancing (Larry Sellers). “It was stereotypical Native stuff, but that’s all that we really had back then,” McClarnon says. “Unfortunately at that time, as a guest-star actor, you weren’t allowed to really voice your opinion on these things.” Still, he found a surprising mentor in Dr. Quinn star Jane Seymour. “She pulled me into her trailer once, sat me down, and talked to me about the business a little bit,” McClarnon says. “It inspired me so much that an actress of that stature, a number one on a TV show, would do that—pull me aside and talk to me about the pitfalls.” They recently saw each other for the first time in 30 years. “I thanked her for helping me jump-start my career,” he says.
It’s very easy to look back on the last 25 years of The Simpsons and write it off as being rubbish because, well, for the most part it has been exactly that. But sometimes, like the sun shining through for an hour between passing storms, it can still get its shit together, and the upcoming tribute to Death Note looks like one of those rare occasions.
It’s part of the show’s next Treehouse of Horror Halloween compilation, and will give The Simpsons a full anime makeover for one of the episode’s instalments. You can see it in action in this short video below, which introduces Lisa as the recipient of the Death Note (or, as it’s called here, the Death Tome):
Some screenshots have also been released, giving us a good look at anime Homer and Marge as well:
Smart light it up Can display up to 57 colors at one time, have an incredible range of combinations, can react to your music, be shaped as you like using the segments, and work with most voice assistants.
Image: The Simpsons
Image: The Simpsons
If your first thought was “wow, that looks a lot better than I was expecting”, you are not alone! But there’s a very good reason this looks so authentic to the source material: this segment has been animated by Korean studio DR Movie, who have a long history of helping out behind the scenes on various American and Japanese properties, ranging from The Animatrix to Justice League to, most importantly in this case, the Death Note anime series itself.
The episode will air on October 30, and will be the second of three segments. The other two will be a Babadook homage starring Marge and a Westworld parody. Which is weird, given The Simpsons has already done a Westworld thing, one that lasted an entire episode and is one of the series’ all-time greats, but I guess 1994 was long enough ago (and the modern HBO series so different) that they feel like they can do it all over again and newer viewers won’t even notice.
