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Fallout: How the COVID-19 pandemic shaped Amazon Prime Video's show

We're all Vault-dwellers according to Fallout's showrunners

Fallout
Image credit: Prime Video

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Get ready for the end times as Fallout season 1 debuts April 11 on Amazon's Prime Video... or, perhaps, we're already ready enough. We all are still recuperating from the COVID pandemic, and our recent conversation with series showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner reveal how the pandemic affected them as they began writing it before and during the pandemic.

In Fallout, many people famously live (or lived) in underground vaults to protect them from the affects of nuclear blasts and radiation around the world. Although they weren't announced as showrunners of Prime Video's Fallout until January 2022, Wagner and Robertson-Dworet reveal that they had been in talks with Amazon and Bethesda going back to 2019 - and that the pandemic shutdown influenced their approach to the material.

The pair "had thematic reasons for picking Lucy, a Vault-dweller, as one of our key point-of-view characters," Robertson-Dworet tells Popverse. "Graham and I always want to be making fun of ourselves, we hope, not other people, and we started talking about the show back in 2019, and obviously, early 2020 was the pandemic, and we turned into Vault-dwellers ourselves."

"Society at the time was like, ‘The right thing for you to do is stay home. Don’t leave your house.’ But we really struggled with it, because we felt like ‘Oh, my gosh, we’re letting other people go do our grocery shopping for us – they’re taking the risk for us, and we’re just these privileged little jerks who get to stay in a bunker’," Robertson-Dworet continues. "So, we really related to Lucy at that point in our lives."

Read our full interview with the Fallout showrunners now. Fallout season 1 debuts April 11 on Prime Video.


Get ready to get out of your Vault and into the Fallout world - with our help, of course. Here is a guide to the Fallout timeline, how to play and watch all of Fallout, details on the Fallout cast, how the Fallout cast & crew really get the harsh humor we're looking for, as well as a Q&A with Fallout showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.