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

Amazon's Fallout TV show is ready to emerge from its vault. Prime Video's take on Bethesda's beloved post-apocalypse games is out tonight (that's April 10, if you're reading this around its release) – and we thoroughly enjoyed what it had to offer. Read more about why we did in our spoiler-light Fallout TV show opinion piece.

Once you're done seeing why we had an atomically entertaining time with the Prime Video series, you'll need to quickly acclimate yourself with everything we know about the streamer's TV adaptation of Fallout. Luckily for you, we've rounded up every piece of important information about the genre-bending show, including its newly revised release date, cast list, story details, future seasons and more. 

Potential spoilers for Fallout on Prime Video follow – you have been warned!

Fallout TV show release date

Amazon's Fallout TV show is set to premiere on Prime Video – one of the world’s best streaming services – on Wednesday, April 10. Well, in the US, anyway. UK and Australian viewers can stream it on Thursday, April 11 – the series' previously revised launch date (it was initially set to arrive on Friday, April 12).

Usually, brand-new Prime Video shows, or the series' newest entry, arrives with a two- or three-episode premiere. However, in a marked departure for Amazon TV Originals, all eight episodes will be available to watch on launch day.

Fallout TV show trailer

The official trailer for Prime Video's Fallout arrived on March 7, and it invited you to a hilariously grim party at the end of the world.

There are tons of Easter eggs and other universe-specific references for 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. 

Lastly, if you missed its unveiling on March 20, you can watch the first official clip, which teased an R-rated Western stand off that suggests it'll be one of the funnier shows of 2024, below:

Fallout TV show cast

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

• Ella Purnell as Lucy MacLean
• Walton Goggins as The Ghoul/Cooper Howard
• Aaron Moten as Maximus
• Kyle McLachlan as Hank MacLean
• Moisés Arias as Norm MacLean
• Xelia Mendes-Jones as Dane
• Michael Emerson as Siggi Wilzig
• Johnny Pemberton as Thaddeus
• Sarita Choudhury as Moldaver
• Dave Register as Chet
• Mike Doyle as Mr. Spencer
• Cherien Dabis as Birdie
• Dale Dickey as Ma June
• Matty Cardarople as Huey
• Annabel O'Hagen as Steph
• Matt Berry as Mr. Handy
• Leslie Uggams as Betty Pearson
• Zach Cherry as Woody Thomas
• Rodrigo Luzzi as Reg McPhee
• Chris Parnell as Ben
• Frances Turner as Barb Howard
• Teagan Meredith as Janey Howard

Of the above, Purnell (Arcane, Army of the Dead), Goggins (Ant-Man and the Wasp, Justified), and Moten (Emancipation, Father Stu) are the show's 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 as Cooper Howard, a 21st century A-list actor, throughout its eight-episode run, with the teaser showing his family-centric life prior to a devastating nuclear event that destroyed the world as we know it.

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. Like Lucy, though, his worldview will be questioned as the plot progresses.

McLachlan (Twin Peaks) is playing Hank, Lucy’s father and Vault 33's oversee (aka leader). Other confirmed character identities include Michael Emerson (Lost) as Siggi Wilzig, an enigmatic wanderer who reportedly helps Lucy on her quest (per Vanity Fair), Mike Doyle (Law and Order) as another Vault 33 resident 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

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."

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 October 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.

Fallout’s TV adaptation is set 219 years after that cataclysmic event in the year 2296. 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’. Expect dramatic fireworks when the trio cross paths and their wildly different outlooks on life subsequently clash.

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.

"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." 

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. Those elements, Nolan exclusively told TechRadar, would hopefully satisfy fans, especially as Fallout's TV show will be "asking them to surrender" other aspects of the games, which they might not necessarily agree with the changes it makes to the source material.

Everything that happens in the Fallout TV show is official lore in Bethesda’s award-winning franchise, too. "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." 

Elaborately further in an exclusive chat with TechRadar, Howard revealed that the series includes "the one thing we could never do" in the games – that being, exploring the franchise's alternate reality before The Great War decimated planet Earth. As mentioned in our cast section, we'll view the world through Cooper Howard's eyes in the lead-up to the first bombs dropping, as well as the actual event itself. Essentially, whatever happens in Amazon's TV show, then, is officially part of Fallout's expansive universe.

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

Amazon hasn't officially announced that there'll be more seasons, but it's inevitable that its Fallout TV show will return. Considering the rave reviews its first season has earned, it'll not only take a spot on our best Prime Video shows shortly, but it's also sure to be a big hit among general audiences – yourself included.

Speaking exclusively to TechRadar, Nolan said that "really cool" season 2 plans had been discussed in-house, even though a second season hasn't been greenlit yet (at least publicly, anyway). According to The Hollywood Reporter (THR), the state of California has gifted a $25 million tax credit to Prime Video with the aim of luring the production over from New York. Ordinarily, as THR claims, such offers are only made to TV shows that have been secretly renewed, so this is our clearest indication that Fallout season 2 is already on the way. Here's hoping we get confirmation on that front very soon.

For more Prime Video-based coverage, read our guides on 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.