As an artist, you can’t always please everyone—especially if you’re stepping into an established fandom. Jonathan Nolan, the creator of the upcoming Fallout TV series for Amazon Prime Video, seems to understand that. In fact, he recently said that trying to please fans is something of an impossible task.
During a recent press event attended by the UK lifestyle tech magazine T3, Nolan said he didn’t create the series to appease players of the game. Figuring out how to make other people happy, Nolan said, is “kind of a fool’s errand.” As such, he explained that artists should focus on making art that makes them happy, and says he’s done that with Fallout, which hits Amazon Prime Video on April 11.
“I don’t think you really can set out to please the fans of anything,” he said. “Or please anyone other than yourself. I think you have to come into this trying to make the show that you want to make and trusting that, as fans of the game [ourselves], we would find the pieces that were essential to us…and try to do the best version.”
While he doesn’t intend to pander to die-hard Fallout fans, Nolan doesn’t plan to deviate too much from the series’ lore, either. He’s a fan of Bethesda Softworks’ franchise, saying Fallout 3 damn-near ruined his life. The chokehold the game had on him was part of the reason why he wanted to co-create the show to begin with.
“It started, for me, with Fallout 3, which devoured about a year of my life,” he explained. “I was an aspiring young writer at that point, and it almost derailed my entire career. It’s so ludicrously playable and fun…seriously, the games were just incredible. It’s such a rare and unbelievable thing that I’ve gotten to do twice in my career, to take something that you love and get a chance to play in that universe, to create your own version. The first go-round for me was Batman, and this time with Fallout—a series of games that I absolutely loved.”
Announced in July 2020 and revealed in December 2023 with a first trailer, Fallout is a canonical series that’ll walk in lockstep with the games it’s based on. Bethesda studio head Todd Howard serves as an executive producer alongside Nolan and Westward co-creator Lisa Joy, with Nolan saying the show is “almost” Fallout 5.
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