'Fallout' and Emmy's Nerd Prom Potential
Could sci-fi dominate the drama category? Plus: Cannes' hot list awards-bait tip sheet
The whole point of Peak TV is that there’s something for everybody, right? Shows you’ve never heard of can be gigantic ratings hits because they appeal primarily to teenage girls (bring on season three, Ginny and Georgia). Or a series with a devoted but extremely niche audience can hang in there long enough to get four seasons and a Tubi movie.
But when it comes to the Emmys, the spotlight tends to shine on a far narrower range of shows: the Prestige TV that generously lends its name to this newsletter. As different as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Euphoria might be, they share DNA of high production values, top-tier talent and a general demand to be taken seriously. When even your comedies are praised for having a “screaming edge of desperation,” you most certainly have a type.
So what happens when something that’s maybe a little deliberately goofy, ultraviolent or colorful — or all of the above — sneaks into the mix?
That’s what Prime Video’s Fallout is attempting this year, riding the wave of its gangbusters first-week viewership numbers to a slot in the wide-open drama series field.
In this post-Game of Thrones world, there’s a clear path for genre shows and even video-game adaptations to break through at the Emmys. But with both Fallout and Netflix’s hard-sci-fi adaptation 3 Body Problem in the mix, the Television Academy could very well feel inclined to pick a single geeky lane. Although the comedy categories don’t mind including shows that veer toward drama — yes, The Bear, we’re still talking about you — a drama that flirts with broad comedy like Fallout can sometimes be a tougher sell.
Hollywood Finally Cracks Video-Game IP
When the pilot episode of Fallout begins, you might feel like you’re in a slightly heightened Mad Men reboot, or maybe a spinoff from Apple’s alternate-universe space race saga For All Mankind. Walton Goggins, matinee-idol perfect as a TV cowboy, is entertaining a children’s birthday party, held at the kind of mid-century modern architectural masterpiece with a sweeping view of Los Angeles that would make any aspiring mogul weep.
It’s beautiful, but it’s doomed, as the title Fallout suggests. In this world, a version of America still heavily influenced by the culture of the 1950s suffered a series of nuclear attacks; a century later, the survivors have either been scratching out life on a blasted surface or living in relative safety in a series of underground bunkers. By the time Goggins re-emerges at the end of the episode, this time as a noseless undead creature called The Ghoul, the series has swept right past heightened reality into its own (extremely popular) world entirely.
In its first episode — all eight premiered on April 10 — Fallout nimbly establishes its tone, from a gleefully bloody bunker fight sequence to Goggins’ sarcastic one-liners. If you’ve tired of grim apocalyptic sagas, you might find solace in Fallout’s cheeky approach, with chipper '50s tunes accompanying violent standoffs, or one character preparing to saw off the head of another with a determined “Okey dokey.”
The Fallout video game has inspired three sequels and five spinoffs since debuting in 1997, all of which have seen a bump in sales since the series premiered a month ago. (Microsoft, which owns Fallout publisher Bethesda, hopefully sent Prime Video head Mike Hopkins a thank-you gift basket, provided recent layoffs haven’t slashed the budget). There have been attempts to turn the series into a movie practically since it was first released, but it took Westworld duo Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy to make it happen, executive producing alongside Bethesda producer Todd Howard, with Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet as showrunners.
It’s a remarkable success story given the decades of failed or terrible video game adaptations that preceded it, though not quite as unprecedented as it would have been before the success of The Last of Us on HBO last year. As Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter, “It’s always nice to be the first one. But when somebody makes something as good as The Last of Us, it makes it easier, because suddenly everyone understands what’s possible.”
So is what’s possible for Fallout at the Emmys the same as what it was for The Last Of Us, which earned eight wins from 24 nominations? The likelier comparison is probably Amazon’s The Boys, which snagged a surprise slot in the best drama series category back in 2021. A superhero series adapted from a comic book, The Boys shares a lot of Fallout’s wry, violent sensibility, and likely shocked as many Emmy voters as a Fallout nomination would. As The Boys creator Eric Kripke tweeted with his own surprise back in 2021: “#EmmysVotedForATenFootDick.”
Characters Welcome
Visual effects and makeup categories aside, Emmys are not really won by 10-foot, uh, anatomy, or Fallout’s mutated monsters, or the fungus-inspired zombies of The Last of Us. To get into that best drama series category, you’ve got to have characters and performances that resonate.
Goggins is the likeliest contender for Fallout, a scene-stealer with just one previous Emmy nomination for Justified, which makes him officially underappreciated. Like The Gilded Age contender Carrie Coon, he’s been squeezing in FYC appearances while filming the next season of The White Lotus in Thailand. But the sheer fact that he’s currently on the set of The White Lotus should tell you that his star — even at 52 — is still rising.
I’d also love to see some momentum for Ella Purnell, a breakout in the first season of Yellowjackets who brings pep but also steel to the wide-eyed Lucy, raised in a protected fallout shelter while the rest of the world went to hell. She does so much to anchor the show’s swings toward bonkers, the kind of role that’s led to Emmy nominations for actresses on other genre shows, such as Lovecraft Country’s Jurnee Smollett and Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood.
It’s also the essential role played by another contender this year: 3 Body Problem’s Jess Hong.
Netflix’s adaptation of the blockbuster Chinese sci-fi novels by Liu Cixin, 3 Body Problem is generally a more sober show than Fallout, set in what’s basically our reality until a group of distant aliens start tinkering with it. The story eventually manages to include a VR video game, a cryogenically frozen head, an alien-worshipping cult and a message that fills every single screen on earth with the threatening message YOU ARE BUGS. It all makes sense in context, I swear.
Adapting Liu’s famously detail-heavy novels, showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss — yes, the Game of Thrones guys — and Alexander Woo rearranged the central characters into a group of former college classmates known as the Oxford 5. The shift makes room for some romances and old rivalries in addition to the hard science, and it’s Hong as the physicist Jin Cheng who often brings all those elements together.
A New Zealand actress working in Hollywood for the first time — between her and The Sympathizer’s Hoa Xuande, it’s quite a season for antipodean breakouts — Hong is warm and relatable even as she explains daunting scientific concepts. The show has other standout performances, including from Game of Thrones alum John Bradley and an indomitable Rosalind Chao, but a nomination for Hong would really capture what the show accomplishes at its best.
Of course, that all depends on the Television Academy going for it. There’s a version of the drama series race where the category fills up with more classic dramas like The Crown, The Gilded Age, Slow Horses and The Morning Show, with a smidge of sci-fi courtesy of the out-there finale of The Curse. There’s also a version where it embraces Fallout and 3 Body Problem as well as Disney’s big swings Ahsoka and Loki, or Apple’s futuristic Silo.
Last year’s drama lineup went to outer space with Andor as well as to the fantasy worlds of The Last of Us and House of the Dragon, so there’s clearly space to be had. But the question we’ll be asking until nominations — and probably for many Emmy seasons to come — is just how geeky is the Television Academy willing to get?
In Other News . . .
See You in Hollywood!
If you’re reading this today, on Monday, I’ll be moderating The Ankler x Backstage Screening Series event tonight in L.A., talking to Expats creator Lulu Wang and star Sarayu Blue about their beautifully made and haunting limited series, adapted from the novel by Janice Y.K. Lee. The event is sold-out, but I look forward to seeing you at the next one!
Cannes Hot List
The Cannes Film Festival officially kicks off on Wednesday, with new films from globally known auteurs like Andrea Arnold, Paul Schrader, Jia Zhangke and Yorgos Lanthimos filling the competition slots.
(Reminder: Our joint Ankler x Screen International Cannes daily newsletter will start on May 15th, helmed by Gregg Kilday from Cannes, with contributions from Claire Atkinson — and of course the best of Screen’s top-notch reporting.)
It’s a good reminder that Cannes is much, much more than the red carpet at the Grand Palais, and in a much less glitzy corner of the Croisette you’ll find the bright shining hopes of film festivals yet to come: the Cannes market (the sort of stuff our joint newsletter will dive into).
Sales titles are technically none of my business — we hand statues to the finished product, not the best laid plans of a press release. But some of the projects that hit my inbox inevitably caught my attention and just might be fodder for awards seasons to come. A few favorites:
Willem Dafoe and Sandra Hüller in Late Fame. A project that very well could have been born at an event during last year’s awards season — Poor Things’ Dafoe and Anatomy of a Fall’s Hüller, joining up with May December writer Samy Burch and producer Christine Vachon. The director is Kent Jones, the former head of the New York Film Festival who’s teamed up with Martin Scorsese for several documentaries and made his narrative debut with 2018’s Diane. If your movie isn’t selling at Cannes, you can tell yourself all the big names were taken up by this one.
Ben Stiller and Colin Farrell in Belly of the Beast. All of Us Strangers may have sputtered out at the end of last Oscar season, but director Andrew Haigh remains a major talent, and he’ll further raise his profile with this project, recounting the troubled friendship between Norman Mailer (Stiller) and former convict Jack Henry Abbott (Farrell). Stiller, who has mostly been working on his own projects like Escape at Dannemora and Severance, could be the fascinating wildcard here.
Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer do Robin Hood. Spare me your eyerolls about yet another Robin Hood story — like King Arthur or Harry Potter, you’re simply never going to be rid of him. With direction from Michael Sarnoski, of Pig and the upcoming A Quiet Place: Day One, this might be an imaginative take that actually lives up to the word. Yes, that’s what we thought about Ridley Scott’s 2010 version, but let us dream, okay?
Russell Crowe and Rami Malek go to Nuremberg. It’s been 63 years since Judgment at Nuremberg won two Oscars, and Oppenheimer has World War II back on Hollywood’s radar, so why not give it another spin? James Vanderbilt, best known as a writer for Zodiac and recently Scream VI, is writing and directing, and the cast is pretty stacked beyond the two best actor winners at the top: Michael Shannon, John Slattery, Richard E. Grant, Colin Hanks, One Day breakout Leo Woodall and more.
Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård in leather. No, there’s no set photo, but it seems like a safe assumption based on the description for the “kinky queer romance” Pillion. Skarsgård plays the head of a motorcycle club who takes on Melling’s Colin as his submissive, and takes “all sorts of virginities along the way.” Harry Lighton is behind the camera for the first time, and it doesn’t exactly scream Oscar bait, but I look forward to it being an extremely coveted ticket at Sundance 2026.
Doing the Math on The Bear
Last week FX released a very coy teaser trailer and confirmed a release date for season three of The Bear, which is pretty remarkably sticking to its traditional June release despite last year’s strikes. Last year, season two debuted in the thick of Emmy nomination round voting, a canny move that ensured it was top of mind as the first season was up for its first awards. This year, probably more confident that the nominations are in hand, FX is debuting the show on June 27, four days after nominations round voting closes.
Still, it will ensure that the show is still far fresher in voters’ minds than pretty much anything else — not exactly an edge you need when you’re the odds-on favorite in your category, but hey, it doesn’t hurt.
Department of Corrections
In last week’s look at HBO’s Emmy season, I quoted Felix Gillette on the executives who, along with Casey Bloys, are keeping the HBO identity intact. That list of names should have included Amy Gravitt. I regret the transcription error.