Nolan commissioned Fall Showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet thread that particular needle. The pair chose to center the series around three protagonists, played by Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell and Aaron Clifton Moten, who enter the story at a turning point in their lives. As a cowboy movie star turned demon, Goggins’ character is cold and lawless, a set of emotions you have to imagine arising from the loss he has felt in the 219 years since the first bombs fell. Moten is Maximus, a former orphan who joins the paramilitary technological protectors in the Brotherhood of Steel and finds a chance at greatness. Purnell is Lucy MacLean, a naive Vault inhabitant who sets out into the Wasteland in search of her kidnapped father (Kyle MacLachlan).
“All the dilemmas the Brotherhood of Steel has faced over the years, the kind of quagmire they’ve gotten into and the different angles they’ve taken, are interesting,” Wagner says. “In most of the Fall In the games, you start as a Vault Dweller, so that made a lot of sense since, with the series, you start in a very small space and get to explore a crazy new world just like them.
The showrunners also made sure to include The Ghoul, a non-playable character in the games. “That seemed like something we all wanted to see, because they are kind of the untouchables of the world. Fall world,” says Wagner.
As property, Fall It’s always played with a kind of dark humor, a satirical take on how horrible and complicated life could be after total nuclear annihilation. That’s certainly true of the series, which balances heartbreaking dialogue featuring children about encroaching mushroom clouds with “oh, gee” sexual jokes and an almost comical amount of carnage. Wagner says setting the tone for the series was a tightrope act, as they knew it had to be a little crazy at times and deadly serious at other times.
“We did edits of episodes where there were long stretches of no comedy because that’s what we felt the story needed, and it was like, ‘God, that’s a lot of apocalypse,’” he jokes. “We wanted to make the apocalypse a place we would all want to go.”
However, to some viewers, it may seem like 2024 is already apocalypse-adjacent, making some of the show’s references and scenarios seem overly prophetic. This is all coincidence, says Nolan, as the program began development in 2019, before Covid, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and before renewed hostilities in the Middle East. Still, he adds, making the series “always felt like an opportunity to poke our finger into an open wound of humanity, which is the fact that we still haven’t decided if we’re going to make it or if we’re going to blow ourselves up.”
Humanity, Wagner says, is almost always in its “the end is near” era. The apocalypse is a relative concept. For some people, the apocalypse occurred when women got jobs or started wearing pants. “The world is constantly in a state of ending and we are constantly talking about it,” she says. “We’re all just narcissists who think we’ll be there when the curtain comes down.”
However, assuming the world doesn’t end soon, Nolan says the Fall The team has a plan for where they want the show to go, if they are lucky enough to get a second season.
“However, in television,” Nolan says, “you have to be careful not to leave too much in the way,” something he knows well as the creator of the beloved and then canceled HBO series. Western world. “We just want to focus on making a great season of television. If it works well and there is an opportunity to go again, I am very hopeful that we will have that opportunity.”