Can’t see the teaser? Watch it on YouTube here.
Vault-Tec has finally found a business model even more cynical than selling the end of the world as a home improvement: turning it into a game show. Prime Video used Fallout Day – 23 October, the date the bombs fell back in 2077, for those keeping their Pip-Boys synchronised – to give its unscripted spin-off a proper title, Fallout Shelter: The Experiment, and a launch date. The ten-part competition opens its vault door on 13 January 2027 with four episodes, followed by three more on 20 January and the final three on 27 January. The last dweller standing walks off with $1,000,000, which in Wasteland terms is a frankly indecent quantity of bottle caps.
The teaser is a brisk little thing in which a Pip-Boy flickers into life to announce: “The world is ending. The competition is just beginning.” Which is, give or take a mushroom cloud, the pitch for every series of Big Brother since Channel 4 first locked the doors on a house full of hopefuls and a single bottle of white wine.
The show was first green-lit back in January under the working title Fallout Shelter, cheerfully pinching the name of Bethesda’s 2015 mobile game, in which you play Overseer to a vault full of smiling cartoon residents and occasionally let a radroach nibble one. This time the dwellers are flesh and blood – the casting call was open to US residents aged 21 and over – and they will be shut inside a Vault-Tec shelter to be tested on the seven S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes, plus the eighth, unofficial one that every reality format secretly runs on: the willingness to stab your new best friend in the back the moment the cameras go quiet. Prime’s press material promises drills, psychological dilemmas and behaviour trials of a morally wobbly sort, which anyone who has spent an afternoon in Fallout’s vaults will recognise as Vault-Tec’s entire corporate mission statement.
The pedigree behind the bunker door is serious. Studio Lambert, the outfit behind The Traitors, The Circle and Squid Game: The Challenge, produces with Kilter Films, while Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who made the scripted Fallout into Prime’s surprise crown jewel, executive produce alongside Bethesda’s Todd Howard. Studio Lambert, of course, already has form here. It took a Korean drama about the desperate poor competing to death for the entertainment of the rich and turned it into a contest in which the hopeful competed for money for the entertainment of the rest of us. Satire, it turns out, is merely a format awaiting the right commissioning editor.
Science fiction, naturally, saw all this coming decades ago. Robert Sheckley was skewering lethal game shows in ‘The Prize Of Peril’ back in 1958, and Nigel Kneale’s The Year Of The Sex Olympics had the BBC broadcasting an ordinary family marooned on a remote island for a jaded audience’s amusement in 1968, some thirty years before the television industry decided this was a jolly good idea rather than a warning. The games themselves got there too. Fallout: New Vegas’s Vault 11 already ran the definitive version of this format, with residents voting each year on which neighbour to hand over to the Overseer, and it remains some of the best television never broadcast.
Plenty is still under wraps. No host has been named, nor any contestants, and the format details beyond ‘vault plus challenges plus duplicity’ remain locked behind a cog-shaped door. Here at SFcrowsnest we would settle for Mr Handy wielding a clipboard and a buzz saw, though we suspect the budget has been spent on retro-futurist set dressing and enough Nuka-Cola props to rot the teeth of a small settlement. It will at least fill the gap nicely, as the third season of the scripted series is currently filming with an eye on a spring or summer 2027 debut.
It would be easy to be sniffy about a megacorporation hosting a show in which ordinary folk scramble over each other for cash inside a set built to satirise a megacorporation that made ordinary folk scramble over each other inside its vaults. But the Fallout games were always satire with a mercenary streak – you spent half of Fallout 3 pickpocketing the dead – and the people who made The Traitors compulsive viewing know exactly how to turn mild treachery into appointment telly. Whoever wins, though, would be well advised to read the small print. In two hundred years of fictional history, Vault-Tec has never once honoured a guarantee.
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