What, exactly, is it about TV’s most brutally violent, consistently head-exploding dystopias that makes reality TV competition creators look at them and go, “Oh, yeah, people would love to get in on this in real life?”
This question courtesy of news from THR today, which reports that Studio Lambert—the British reality show maker that previously brought us “Capitalist competition series successfully defeats capitalist critique” offering Squid Game: The Challenge for Netflix—has been tapped by Amazon to create a similar series based in the world of its ongoing Fallout TV show. Titled Fallout Shelter (also the name of a mobile game set in the wider Fallout gaming universe), the show will stick a bunch of regular people in a bunker to “prove their ingenuity, teamwork, and resilience as they compete for safety, power, and ultimately a huge cash prize,” because if there’s one thing that playing and watching Fallout over the years has taught us, it’s that nothing ever goes wrong when you stick people in a bunker and then perform elaborate tests on them.
But while we can roll our eyes at the Don’t Create The Torment Nexus of it all, the real answer to questions about why shows like this exist isn’t difficult to parse: They’re cheap to make, they extend the brand, and you can get 100 people to sign up for basically anything if there’s the promise of a big cash prize at the end. (It’s not like we’re immune, either: It’d be cool to walk through a Fallout Vault for an afternoon! Which doesn’t mean we want to be subjected to whatever knock-off MrBeast shenanigans Studio Lambert can cook up for this.) The series joins an increasing list of such brand-based competition shows, which also includes that 007: Road To A Million show that Prime rolled out over the last few years, which, hey, at least has a more fun fantasy attached to it than “Pretend to be trapped with a bunch of idiots, after everyone you know and love has been annihilated in atomic fire.”
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