Fallout scored an impressive 16 Emmy nominations on Wednesday, including a nod for Outstanding Drama Series.
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It’s one of the most-nominated shows that Amazon’s Prime Video has ever in a single year ( The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel put up 20 in its heyday), and it also is another shining moment for video game adaptations, following on the heels of the success of The Last of Us last year.
“It’s a 25-year-old game franchise that just keeps getting more and more relevant with the way that it takes on a lot of very serious issues about our society and our deepest fears, but it plays with them in a really fun way and makes it a world that you want to spend time in,” series creator and showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet told Deadline.
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Added creator and showrunner Graham Wagner, who was catching up on the nominations while on the phone with Deadline after a tennis lesson: “ Fallout originated from a really wild and creative period of video game making, and television is seems to be just catching up to that moment now, similar to movies catching up to the somewhat psychedelic Marvel Comics of the 60s and 70s. So I feel like we’re in that pattern.”
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After a more than a decade writing comedy series ( Portlandia, anyone?), Wagner says that one of the most exciting elements of Fallout ‘s nominations — and others — is “the blurring of the lines between comedy and drama.”
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“I don’t know what was nominated for half hour, but I’m sure there was some pretty relatively serious half hours and some relatively goofy hour longs, and I’m just grateful for the breakdown of those barriers,” he said, joking that he’s “not one to tell the Academy what to do, especially in the moment I’m in right now.”
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He continued: “But at the same time…I’ve actually felt for a long time that sometimes comedy suffers from announcing that it’s a comedy, and the humor becomes expected and routine when the whole function is to catch you off guard…So I think we shouldn’t let these categories drive the creative. Creative, it seems like these days, it’s doing what it wants.”
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Fallout is perhaps a perfect example of a show that blurs those lines. Set in a post-Apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, the series isn’t all doom and gloom the way that many contemporary series that deal with the end of the world are.
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The show’s strange tone lends itself to plenty of serious moments, but also humor that leans toward slapstick comedy at certain times.
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“I do think the humor is serviced by the drama and the gravitas that are significant,” Wagner said. “We had comedy people working on the show, and Geneva brought in a bunch of drama people working on the show. So both camps fed one another, I think, in a really helpful way.”
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It helped, of course, to have Walton Goggins — who is nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series — who Robertson-Dworet calls “the best in the world at both.”
“There’s no one who can deliver a more dramatic monologue and say it in a more unexpected way, but there’s also no one funnier,” she said.
Wagner and Robertson-Dworet were still reeling from their nominations when they hopped on the phone with Deadline, with the latter expressing gratitude that “all those sacrifices that people on our cast and crew made are being recognized.”
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The pair are hard at work on Season 2 of Fallout , which was greenlit quite quickly after the first season debuted, given that it put up record viewership for Amazon . They remained tight-lipped about the details of Season 2, but Robertson-Dworet did say they are “having a blast with it.”
“The crazy thing about making Season 1 is that you have eight hours to adapt a franchise, in which there’s thousands of hours of gameplay to draw from, and it just means that you have to leave so many of your favorite pieces of the mythology behind,” she said. “So we’re honestly just excited to get to be able to dive deeper into it and show audiences more of this incredible world.”
As they continue to write, Wagner says they’re discovering that there’s plenty of story to sustain them far past Season 2, if Amazon allows, teasing: “We barely scratched the surface of the world of Fallout in Season 1, and it feels like in Season 2 we’re getting another scratch in, but there’s more to be done.”
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