Crawling out through the fallout of terrible video game adaptations, Amazon Prime Studio’s Fallout TV series is a perfect representation of the perennial video game series from 1997.

I honestly did not think they could pull it off. I’d been so disappointed by some of my favorite franchises being turned into movies and TV shows before — namely Paramount Plus’ Halo series.

Flash! Bam! Alakazam — did this show surprise me, just falling out of an orange-colored sky.

It’s a show that just gets it. 

Fallout’s classic tone — bleakley depressing and yet raucously funny, all the while delivering iconoclastic satire on American-branded consumerism and nationalism — is done perfectly. It understands the series’ main ethos, too. The line “Everyone wants to save the world. They just disagree on how,” delivered by Aaron Moten’s character, Maximus, captures what the series has been trying to say since the ’90s.

Taking 3D assets straight from the games, this series makes it feel like I’m playing a brand new Fallout game from our god Todd Howard. It doesn’t just look like it, it feels like it, too. Playing classic songs like “So Doggone Lonesome” by Johnny Cash, “It’s a Man” by Benny Hutton and “Orange Colored Sky” by Nat King Cole make me feel like I’m exploring the bombed-out wasteland of Los Angeles.And personally, I couldn’t have been happier watching the end of the world on Amazon Prime.