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The upcoming Fallout TV series from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy is not aiming to please fans and gamers. Trying to do that would be a “fool’s errand,” Nolan said during a recent event attended by T3. Instead, as a massive fan of the Fallout series himself, Nolan tried to make a show that made him happy, and he believes he has achieved that.
“I don’t think you really can set out to please the fans of anything,” he said. “Or please anyone other than yourself. I think you have to come into this trying to make the show that you want to make and trusting that, as fans of the game [ourselves], we would find the pieces that were essential to us… and try to do the best version.”
Nolan is a huge fan of the Fallout series, starting with Fallout 3. That game “devoured about a year of my life,” he said. “It almost derailed my entire career. It’s so ludicrously playable and fun… seriously, the games were just incredible,” he said.
The writer-director went on to say that he was similarly a huge fan of the Batman series before he and his brother Christopher made a trilogy of Batman films. In fact, Jonathan Nolan wrote one of The Dark Knight’s most iconic and enduring lines. Regarding fandom and the Fallout TV show, Nolan said his aim was to make himself happy. “And I’ve made myself very happy with the show,” he said.
The Fallout TV series premieres April 11 on Prime Video. In addition to Nolan and Joy, Bethesda’s Todd Howard was involved in the production and informed the showrunners to avoid certain subjects that could be featured in the upcoming Fallout 5.
The Fallout TV series doesn’t tell the story of any particular Fallout game, but instead it offers an original story. The open-world game series allows people to do whatever they want and become their own hero, so trying to adapt that into a show wouldn’t work very easily, co-showrunner Graham Wagner said.
“It’s more creatively interesting to be able to build our own story in the world that they’ve carved out for us,” Wagner said. “That’s historically been the trajectory of Fallout. It’s traded hands many times, with different creative teams taking it over. It’s kept it fresh, kept it relevant. We chose to just vainly look at this as our Fallout.”
