If you thought “Fallout,” this year’s smash TV video game adaptation, would just capitalize on the success of 2023’s “The Last of Us,” you’re in for a fun, funny, socially conscious surprise. The Prime Video series, overseen by HBO’s “Westworld” co-creator and “The Dark Knight” screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, launches from Bethesda Softworks’ role-playing franchise concept of a future yet 1950s retro society destroyed in minutes by a nuclear war. The surface is still a wasteland 219 years later, but the descendants of wealthy survivors have flourished in isolated, luxury bunkers built by the Vault-Tec Corp.
In the show’s opener, chipper, capable but otherwise unprepared Lucy (“Yellowjackets’” Ella Purnell) leaves her vault to rescue her kidnapped father. In the sandblasted remains of Los Angeles, she encounters the grotesque, eat-or-be-eaten reality of the remaining have-nots. Key among her new companions are Maximus (Aaron Moten, “Emancipation”), a squire in the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel who’s illegally appropriated a knight’s power armor suit; and the Ghoul (Emmy-nominated “Justified” actor Walton Goggins), a wicked, decaying bounty hunter kept alive by drugs for centuries, whom we see in prewar flashbacks as the good-guy cowboy actor Cooper Howard.
Television The veteran character actor from ‘The Shield’ and ‘Justified’ is having a standout year, playing the Ghoul in Prime Video’s ‘Fallout’ and a role in Seas.
