Many moons ago I was reading the book of former Top Gear writer Richard Porter. It’s an interesting read and an inside look at what is quickly proving to be an un-recreatable moment in television history. However, one of the more interesting things he said was that he noticed something peculiar. Top gear was an excellent car show. It was an excellent car show precisely because it wasn’t about cars. However, the further away the presenters got away from cars, the worse did the end result ended being.
This explains things like their art gallery show and their “film a car chase” show are abject failures, even for the people that mostly watched the show to watch people fall over and try to explode.
When I took at look at their idea for an upcoming Fallout TV show, I noticed myself getting the same feeling that Mr. Porter did.
Apart from the schism that going from Isometric to First person did for Fallout fans (and really, is it really a schism if most of the people who played the isometric ones can begrudgingly admit that there’s something good on the 3D ones at least), attempts at Fallout branching into other things generally don’t go well. There’s Fallout Shelter, which did little to distinguish itself from other mobile games. There’s also Fallout 76, whose launch was so disastrous that it’s only through the sunk cost fallacy and even more horrendous launches that it does not remain in its place as one of the worst games ever.
The idea of making a show about it doesn’t strike me as an especially good idea. The Fallout series has been going for so long that they’re running out of empty places to add lore in. Not to mention the amount of things that they have created that would’ve solved the problems leading up to the war and that apparently were going to be ready the exact day that the bombs fell. This show would add even more complications to that and use one of the US’s prime targets in Los Angeles. Admittedly it will not be especially hard to imagine a Los Angeles on the brink of collapse, overcrowded and filled with traffic. All the while having the best marketers in the world trying to make it as appealing as possible while hating it at the same time.
Nevertheless, if nothing else the show will be good from a few laughs. Not from itself, but from people who take their interest in a video game franchise entirely too seriously. The amusement of them screaming that this show will be the end of the franchise itself somehow, and how the game industry and Bethesda will never recover from it…somehow.
The rest of us will simply have to make up our own minds…after the show passes an 8 Charisma check.
