Senior Bethesda dev says the Fallout show works because Todd Howard wouldn't let the usual 'videogame directors' touch it: 'We want the best director, the best showrunner possible'

The Fallout TV show returns for Season 2 next week, with the series opting for a weekly cadence that goes right into February (fine by me: I've still got Stranger Things to finish). Executive producer Jonathan Nolan has already confirmed season three will begin shooting next summer, which just shows you the kind of faith Amazon has in this as a long-term project, and when PCG spoke to some of Bethesda's most senior Fallout team Nolan was a name that popped up frequently.

PCG's Ted Litchfield recently spoke to a number of Bethesda worthies, including design director Emil Pagliarulo, and a common theme among all of them was admiration for the quality of the show. In most circumstances you'd put this down to company people saying the right thing about a company product, but the thing is that the Fallout TV show's first season was great. I ended up watching it with my partner, who isn't exactly into sprawling brown RPGs, and by the end she was enraptured by the depth and weirdness of this take on the post-apocalypse.

"It's really fascinating that the show is part of our lore," says Pagliarulo. "It's connected to the games, it's by having the show set, I think it's nine years after Fallout 4. There's enough time that has passed that there's some leeway, but it's definitely still the same universe. And the same wasteland, just nine years on.

"It's amazing to see my friend's mom, who's like, 75⁠—she loves the show. Someone who never played a video game in her life and has no interest in that, it's drawn in people that would never be associated with it or exposed to it. It's a really amazing thing. The real reason for that is because⁠, credit to Todd Howard, we could have made a Fallout movie or Fallout TV show a decade ago⁠—we had certainly been asked."

Here's where Nolan enters, who roughly a decade ago would have been working on the first (and best) season of Westworld, an inspired re-imagining of the Michael Crichton classic. I suspect the offers for Fallout adaptations would stretch back even further than that, but the issue was how the property was perceived by Hollywood, which has only very recently gotten its act together with videogame movies.

"Hollywood, at the time, they wanted to throw the 'videogame directors' at us," says Pagliarulo. "We don't want the guy who makes videogame movies. We want the best director, the best showrunner possible. And it wasn't until Jonathan Nolan and his company had their pitch. This is the guy who wrote the Batman movies. This is the guy who made Westworld. This is the guy we want. A lot of it was waiting to find the right partner, and not just doing it because you could."

I should say Nolan co-wrote both the Dark Knight Trilogy and Westworld (with Christopher Nolan and Lisa Joy respectively), and of course there are many more writers involved. But Pagliarulo's point stands: there's an alternate universe where someone like Uwe Boll ended up doing a Fallout movie in 2010, and one can only imagine how much that would've stunk out the joint.