This seems to be the week were I spend too much time talking about things I haven’t watched or read because someone said something stupid. So for the record…I have not watched Amazon Prime’s Fallout, nor have I played the games because only post-apocalypse story I ever enjoyed was Thundarr The Barbarian. The games may be good, and given their reputation probably are. The show may be good, and an article I’ll be pointing to later even says it’s one of Amazon Prime’s better adaptations.
That’s faint praise, mind you. Between Tolkien, the Wheel Of Time series, and grabbing the abandoned Batman cartoon that seems to treat adaptation as a way to use branding to push their own stories or “do it better than the original”, a foolish notion often shared with Netflix and their approach to live-action adaptations of anime. So any accuracy at this point is probably going to get praise from the fanbase. However, while a one-to-one adaptation between formats is nearly impossible, especially from a first person interactive experience like the Fallout games, there are still rules to follow, and while it sounds like they hit more targets than normal, I’ve also heard complaints about the flaws in the series as a narrative as well as an adaptation.
The first article we’re examining comes from the Fallout showrunners being interviewed about their show. In it they’re asked about adapting a video game to television, and they made a few of the same errors made when discussing the Twisted Metal adaptation that was apparently less faithful to the source material, another property I know nothing about but was able to research pretty easily, unlike the showrunners. So remember, I’m not judging the show on any level. I’m only looking at what the showrunners said about the loose parts of the adaptations and going “well actually…”, so if you’re turned off by that I have better articles here for you to check out. Or if you just want to know what they said, keep reading.
We’re starting with this interview in The Hollywood Reporter with the showrunners, starting as usual with their experience.
On paper, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner seem like strange bedfellows to adapt a postapocalyptic video game for TV. “Fallout really is a blend of our backgrounds,” Robertson-Dworet, a screenwriter whose credits include Tomb Raider and Captain Marvel, says of her partner, a writer-producer best known for comedies Silicon Valley, Portlandia and Baskets. “I come from action and genre, and Graham knows the TV and comedy sides. So Fallout is dramatic, but it’s also funny and weird.”
That isn’t a bad thing. For those less initiated than even me, the Fallout franchise is an alternate 1950s, inspired by all the nuclear fallout scares and PSAs that both turned out to be bull@%$%. The concept is “what if the bombs did fall?”, taking a humorous approach to the end of the world. Survivors live in vaults underneath the ground, but the series usually has some reason for the protagonist to go to the surface to get…I don’t know, a new lightbulb or something, and thus the adventures begin. They even note that they need both their skills to make the show work.
You two come from very different worlds, and what you’ve made isn’t necessarily representative of either. How challenging was it to nail the tone of this show?
GRAHAM WAGNER We joke that neither of us can write this show. I’ll do a pass and it isn’t quite right. Then Geneva does a pass and it’s almost there. There isn’t anything on this show that doesn’t have to bounce back and forth between us a few times. We talked a lot about the Venn diagram of it — it has to be something that Geneva’s excited to write, that I’m excited to write and, especially for the first three episodes, Jonathan (Nolan, the third executive producer) has to be excited to direct. The appeal is in the middle of those three seemingly unrelated circles.
Points for combining your talents to get the best product possible with the premise…if it works, and for the most part it seems to work. Among the reviewers I follow there have been both positive and negative takes, but not along the usual sociopolitical lines we’re used to seeing from the Hollywood system. It’s on the merits of the show as an adaptation and based on its own standing as a show. So I’m not saying negative about the show, and this isn’t even the dumbest take I’ve heard this week. However….
As IP goes, do you find that video games make for looser adaptations than books?
WAGNER Jane Austen isn’t sacred anymore. There might’ve been a time when you were a Philistine if you deviated in an adaptation, but not anymore. For Fallout, we did alter the course of the game’s canonical history. There was a Reddit thread that had to get shut down. (Laughs.) People were so mad. So it is sort of the new sacred cow in a way. That makes it kind of fun to play with.
And this is when I get worried. I’m not a Jane Austen fan, but trust me: her fans still consider it sacred. Messing with fans “sacred cows” just to mess with them is getting the same response you’d get in India for actually messing with sacred cows, except the bloody rampage is only metaphorical with the fans. Outside of ego, we have a situation where creators love screwing over things fan love, as if they really have to own them. It’s not always politics. Todd Philips isn’t ruining the Joker for some social agenda, it’s because he’s an art snob who looks down on comic book movies and wants to prove his tastes are superior to the Clown Prince Of Crime in the comics.
GENEVA ROBERTSON-DWORET Because it’s an open world game, there are many ways the narrative can unfold. It’s not as locked, sequentially, as The Last of Us — where they did a beautiful, very direct adaptation of the video game story. We didn’t have that option, because everyone who plays the game does it in a different order. That was wonderfully liberating, because we got to come up with our own story and our own characters within this world. When we started this project, we asked ourselves, “What characters would we want to create in this world and mythology?”
First off, using The Last Of Us may not be your best example from what I hear. Second, that mythology you’re working with does have a history. These events happened in that universe, these characters you meet up with enough in the games to transfer them over have a set personality and backstory, and while your original show character can do what she wants and be who you want, the previous characters and histories are set in stone, even if that stone sometimes appears to actually be mica. At best, your character’s actions decide how the NPCs will treat you going forward, based on their set personalities, morals (or lack thereof), and perspectives, as well as the events surrounding you and the game characters. That makes the responses genuine to the player and makes the player’s decisions have repercussions, both positive for your mission and “you are so very dead for doing that”.
So did they get anything seriously wrong? Compared to the usual discussion I have on definitely bad adaptations, possibly not. Actual fans (as in not activists who probably never played anything more intense that a slot machine game on their phone) seem to differ, but this Bounding Into Comics article on the interview points out some interesting issues.
Despite being both critically and fan acclaimed as one of the better Hollywood video game adaptations, Amazon’s Fallout series is not without its issues, the most glaring of which is perhaps the fact that, thanks to its confirmed status as canonical to the original mainline games, its story and setting directly retcons large parts of the franchise’s well-established history.
From the confirmation that the NCR and Legion factions of Fallout: New Vegas fame have far less power than originally depicted (with the former even being implicitly wiped out by the Brotherhood of Steel at the end of the first season and the latter seemingly non-existent), to the revival of the Enclave following their elimination at the end of Fallout 2, to the reveal that rather than using the political turmoil around them to their own greedy ends Vault-Tec was actually directly responsible for the dropping of the bombs that turned the world into the nightmarish landscape it now exists as, and much, much more, many fans were baffled (though admittedly not wholly surprised) to see the production team at Amazon so blatantly making changes to the world they knew and love.
What makes this more confusing is this bit from earlier in BIC’s article, emphasis mine:
Despite being both critically and fan acclaimed as one of the better Hollywood video game adaptations, Amazon’s Fallout series is not without its issues, the most glaring of which is perhaps the fact that, thanks to its confirmed status as canonical to the original mainline games, its story and setting directly retcons large parts of the franchise’s well-established history.
If you’re supposed to be canon to the games, and yet you’re still getting the lore wrong, you’re lucky fans aren’t madder than they are. I’m not an expert by any means, but I’m curious how some greedy 1950s corporation is able to cause a nuclear attack on the world. I thought it was the governments being morons, as governments tend to be. That would make more sense. This seems to be trying way too hard to make the large corporation the bad guy…in a show based on the intellectual property of a large corporation and airing on a streaming service owned by a large corporation known for getting adaptations wrong. The changes may seem minor, but they add up and sometimes it’s a minor element that makes a major piece of history work.
Is the show bad? I don’t even like the games, so I’m not the one to tell you. I’m simply pointing out another example of the mindset that is ruining adaptations for fans, who can easily ignore your show and just go back to playing the games, watching let’s plays, and discussing the lore that isn’t from your show with each other. If you’re supposed to be making a canon to the source material story rather than a non-canon adaptations like all the rest out there, it’s even more important to get it right. Fans would call out the games, and they’re going to call you out, too. It shouldn’t be too hard. You have to stay true to the elements in your own show, which requires a story bible of some kind to keep characters and lore accurate across the series or you’ll lose fans. Failing to understand that is why so many adaptations fail in general. Something they may want to keep an eye. There’s a reason The Mandalorian had three seasons but only the first two get praised. Don’t make the same mistake if you want this canon show to keep its fans, and thus keep your jobs.
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