Fallout TV show on Prime Video: release date, trailer, confirmed cast, plot, and more

Lucy emerges from Vault 33 with her right hand raised in Amazon's Fallout TV show
Amazon's Fallout TV show is set in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. (Image credit: Amazon Studios)
Fallout TV show: key information

- Launching in mid-April on Prime Video
- Developed alongside Bethesda Game Studios, makers of the Fallout video games
- First trailer released in December 2023
- Official trailer debuted in early March
- Main cast confirmed in November 2023
- Official plot synopsis revealed
- Will tell a brand-new story in Fallout's fictional universe
- Narrative will be canon in Bethesda's beloved game series
- Future seasons tentatively discussed

Amazon's Fallout TV show is almost ready to emerge from its vault. The retrofuturism-styled post-apocalyptic series, which is based on Bethesda's iconic video game franchise, will be with us in less than a month – so it's time you learned everything we know about it.

Below, we've rounded up all of the most important information about one of 10 exciting TV shows we can’t wait for in early 2024. That includes the newly revealed release date for the eagerly anticipated Prime Video show, as well as the Fallout TV show's two trailers, cast list, plot synopsis, and more. No matter whether you're a huge Fallout fan or a newcomer to the franchise, we've got you covered about what's what before the wacky dystopian show hits our screens. 

Potential spoilers for Fallout's TV series adaptation follow.

Fallout TV show release date

A silhouetted Lucy emerges from Vault 33 in Prime Video's Fallout TV show

Fallout's TV adaptation will be unleashed on the world in April. (Image credit: Amazon Studios)

The Fallout TV show is set to premiere on Prime Video – one of the world’s best streaming services – on Thursday, April 11. That's a day earlier than planned, with Fallout originally due out on April 12. Still, considering most Fallout games have been released in the latter part of any given year, we think Prime Video missed an apocalyptic trick with its Fallout TV show release date.

In a marked departure for an Amazon TV Original, all eight episodes will be available to stream on launch day, too. Usually, the release of a brand-new Prime Video show, or the latest season of a successful one, is accompanied with a two- or three-episode premiere. If Amazon is releasing Fallout season 1 in full on April 11, it must be really confident about its quality and potential popularity.

Fallout's TV adaptation was announced in July 2020, with Amazon confirming the creators of Westworld were bringing it to life. That duo is Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who developed the series but aren’t its showrunners – that honor falls to Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, whose credits include 2019 Marvel movie Captain Marvel (Robertson-Dworet) and Silicon Valley (Wagner). Amazon confirmed the pair’s involvement when the cameras began rolling on Fallout’s live-action iteration in January 2022

Fallout TV show trailer

The official trailer for Amazon's Fallout TV show was released on March 7, and it invites you to a hilariously grim party at the end of the world.

There are tons of Easter eggs and other universe-specific references for long-time Fallout fans to pick out, as well as a bigger teaser about what the TV adaptation's plot will be about. Not only that, but we also get a better look at its primary cast of characters, the game franchise's signature humor, and lots of faithful nods to Fallout's most iconic elements, including its vaults, Power Armor suits, mutated monsters, and beautifully dystopian landscape.

Missed the first teaser, which was released in December 2023 and opening the vault on Prime Video’s authentically apocalyptic series? Check it out below:

The first trailer’s unveiling came five days after our first look at Fallout’s TV series via various official images. You should read our article on seven things that the Fallout TV show images don’t tell you if you’re searching for more clues about what was debuted in them and the trailer, too. 

Fallout TV show cast

The Ghoul sits slumped in a chair with his cowboy hat lowered over his face in the Fallout TV show

Walton Goggins is set to play a mutant character called The Ghoul. (Image credit: Amazon Studios)

 Here’s the confirmed cast for the Fallout TV show so far: 

  • Ella Purnell as Lucy
  • Walton Goggins as The Ghoul
  • Aaron Moten as Maximus
  • Kyle McLachlan as Hank
  • Moisés Arias as Norm
  • Mike Doyle as Mr. Spencer
  • Michael Emerson as Wilzig
  • Johnny Pemberton as Thaddeus
  • Cherien Dabis as Birdie
  • Dale Dickey as Ma June
  • Matty Cardarople as Huey
  • Dave Register as Chet
  • Rodrigo Luzzi as Reg
  • Annabel O'Hagen as Steph
  • Matt Berry as Mr. Handy
  • Sarita Choudhury as TBA
  • Leslie Uggams as TBA
  • Chris Parnell as TBA
  • Frances Turner as TBA
  • Zach Cherry as TBA

Of the above, Purnell (Arcane, Army of the Dead), Goggins (Ant-Man and the Wasp, Justified), and Moten (Emancipation, Father Stu) are its three leads.

Purnell’s Lucy is arguably the series’ primary protagonist. The Army of the Dead star was locked into Fallout’s lead role in March 2022, one month after Goggins was announced as the series' first cast member. Per a Prime Video press blast, Lucy is an "optimistic Vault dweller" whose idealistic view of the world is challenged when she embarks on a dangerous trip across the wasteland.

Goggins, meanwhile, has been installed as The Ghoul, a ruthless and cynical bounty hunter who "hides a mysterious past". The show’s first trailer suggested we’ll learn more about his backstory throughout its eight-episode run, with the teaser showing his family-centric life (he was a human called Cooper Howard) prior to a devastating nuclear event that destroyed the world as we know it.

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As for Moten, he’ll portray Maximus, a member of Fallout’s iconic Brotherhood of Steel faction, a group of military hardware-toting zealots who plug the sociopolitical gap in the absence of an official government. Labeled "a young soldier with a tragic past", Maximus is said to believe in the Brotherhood’s mission to bring stability to the wasteland at any cost. We suspect, though, that his worldview – like Lucy’s – will be questioned as the plot progresses.

McLachlan (Twin Peaks) is signed on to play Hank, Lucy’s father and leader of Vault 33. Other confirmed character identities include Michael Emerson (Lost) as Wilzig, an enigmatic wanderer who reportedly helps Lucy on her quest (per Vanity Fair), Mike Doyle (Law and Order) as someone called Mr. Spencer, Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island) as Norm, Lucy’s brother, and Matt Berry (What We Do In The Shadows) in a duel role as the voice of multipurpose robot Mr. Handy.

Fallout TV show plot

Maximus walks alongside his Brotherhood of Steel master in Amazon's Fallout TV show

The Brotherhood of Steel will feature heavily throughout Fallout's first season. (Image credit: Amazon Studios)

Here’s the official synopsis for Amazon's Fallout TV show: "Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hell-scape their ancestors left behind – and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them."

Not much to go on, then, but we’ve learned a bit more about the series’ plot, and how its main and supporting characters factor into it, from its cast and crew.

First up, a fictional history lesson: in the Fallout franchise, a two-hour nuclear bomb exchange between the US and China ((known in-universe as the 'Great War') decimates planet Earth in 2077. Those lucky (read: rich) enough to survive the brief but destructive event did so in Vaults – subterranean bunkers, built across the US from 2054 onwards by a mysterious company called Vault-Tec, that could support up to 1,000 people each in the event of nuclear war.

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Fallout’s TV adaptation, according to Vanity Fair, is set 219 years after that cataclysmic event. Lucy, a wide-eyed and naive inhabitant of the Los Angeles-located Vault 33 (one of three Vaults we’ll see, Jonathan Nolan told IGN), ventures above ground for the first time when she willingly agrees to embark on a one-person rescue mission for… well, reasons that enter spoiler territory. As Nolan pointed out to Vanity Fair, though, Lucy’s utopian view of the world is quickly shattered and that "her collision with the hard reality of other people’s experiences and what happened to the people who, frankly, were left behind, left to die" makes for a chastening experience that threatens the virtuous perspective she learned about underground.

As the show’s likely first season progresses, Lucy’s story will intersect with The Ghoul’s and Maximus’. It’s unclear how and when this will happen, but expect dramatic fireworks when the trio cross paths and their wildly different outlooks on life subsequently clash.

Some humans look up at the Caswennan ship in Fallout's TV adaptation

Fallout's TV adaptation will feature plenty of call-backs and references to Bethesda's game series. (Image credit: Amazon Studios)

Long-time Fallout fans will be pleased to learn that the TV adaptation hasn’t left the franchise’s dark, absurd, and twisted sense of humor – complete with macabre levels of levity and sardonic slant on modern day America – behind. Bethesda Games director Todd Howard, who oversees the Fallout franchise and is one of the show’s executive producers, told Vanity Fair: "We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence. Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and post-apocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink. I think they [Nolan, Joy, and the showrunners] threaded that needle really well."

As mentioned, Fallout’s prestige TV iteration will also explore 21st century issues and themes through its story, and two particular 60s/70s movies were key inspirations behind weaving such topics and melodrama through the show’s otherwise tongue-in-cheek tone.

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"Just as M*A*S*H gets to talk about Vietnam through the lens of the Korean War," Nolan told Empire magazine, "we get to talk about the mess we’re in now through the lens of… ‘What if everybody just gets on with it and destroys the f****g world?'"

"We talked a lot about The Good, The Bad And The Ugly," Wagner added. "That’s three characters in search of a box of gold, so we asked ourselves, 'What’s the gold in this world?'"

As for the silly bugs and ridiculously funny glitches that the game series is renowned for, don’t expect any such references to appear in Prime Video’s adaptation. Speaking to IGN, Wagner said: "One of my fondest memories playing [Bethesda game The Elder Scrolls II:] Daggerfall is a moment where I just bumped into the wall and watched the entire world fly away from me as I fell off. It was just transcendental and wonderful. 

"I was like, can we get this in the show? And not in the first season, but it's definitely on my mind as a concept. But yeah, we stayed clear of too many winks… we really just want people to buy into this world and not be pushed out of it, because a tall order. It's a pretty crazy place and we just want to get people invested in that first." 

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That said, fans can expect to see some of the game series’ most famous iconography – the smiling, thumbs up-toting Vault Boy, who’ll get his own origin story in the TV show – throughout. There’ll be plenty of other nods to the games, too, such as the inclusion of the wrist-mounted Pip Boy device, mutated insects and monsters aplenty, and the iconic costumes/armor worn by Vault dwellers and the Brotherhood of Steel.

Lastly, everything that happens in the Fallout TV show is official lore in Bethesda’s award-winning franchise. "We view what’s happening in the show as canon," Howard told Vanity Fair. "That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion. I looked at it [some revised elements] like 'Ah, why didn’t we do that?'"

Adds Wagner (via a different IGN article): "We didn't start from a place of characters from the games," Wagner said. "We set things after. We kind of told ourselves, this is Fallout 5, this is just another installation, and we're starting with fresh snow." 

Will there be more seasons of Amazon's Fallout TV show?

Four members of the Brotherhood of Steel walk towards the camera in the Fallout TV show

Will Fallout march its way onto a second season? (Image credit: Amazon Studios)

Right now, Amazon is just banking on its Fallout TV show being a certified hit. We’d be surprised if the series doesn’t make it onto our best Prime Video shows list post-release, but it’s sometimes hard to tell if an expensive show has the quality to do so.

If Fallout is successful, we’ll likely get more seasons. Speaking to IGN, Nolan suggested there are tentative plans in place for future installments, saying: "The question of how that larger story would play season to season was something that we started a conversation with Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet early about that… and what Geneva and Graham have cooked up is very, very exciting. So we're excited to continue telling this story if we're so lucky."

However, Nolan added that, for the time being "our main goal is to deliver one terrific season of television". For now, then, we’ll eagerly await the arrival of Fallout season 1 and hope for a second season renewal if it proves to be incredibly popular.


For more Prime Video-based coverage, read our guides on Invincible season 2 part 2, The Rings of Power season 2, all of the new Prime Video movies to arrive recently, and our pick of the best Prime Video movies.

Senior Entertainment Reporter

As TechRadar's senior entertainment reporter, Tom covers all of the latest movies, TV shows, and streaming service news that you need to know about. You'll regularly find him writing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, and many other topics of interest.


An NCTJ-accredited journalist, Tom also writes reviews, analytical articles, opinion pieces, and interview-led features on the biggest franchises, actors, directors and other industry leaders. You may see his quotes pop up in the odd official Marvel Studios video, too, such as this Moon Knight TV spot.


Away from work, Tom can be found checking out the latest video games, immersing himself in his favorite sporting pastime of football, reading the many unread books on his shelf, staying fit at the gym, and petting every dog he comes across.

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