Here’s something we didn’t think we’d be writing this weekend: We’ve become kind of obsessed with Fallout Fake Talkshow, a video series Prime Video has been releasing over the last month to promote the second season of its ongoing Fallout TV show. We wouldn’t normally be falling over ourselves to heap praise on a promo product generated by The Empire Of Bezos, but, then, normally said content wouldn’t arrive in the form of very funny comedian Jon Daly doing his best impressions of The Eric Andre Show, openly mocking and terrorizing his various co-stars on the series with questions about their addresses, their paychecks, and their current number of teeth.
As we’ve noted in our reviews of the main series, Daly—who plays a recurring weirdo who represents much of the quirky worst of the franchise’s radiation-soaked Wasteland—is one of the most consistently funny parts of Fallout. He’s not exactly in character here—although he is wearing the makeup and shabby clothes of his Snake Oil Salesman—but he’s definitely embracing the chaos that the character embodies. That includes not knowing what his show is called—simply declaring a magnanimous “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to content!” at the top of his interview with Walton Goggins—and doing everything in his power to break his subjects. (Most effectively in his interview with Justin Theroux, who loses it at the frequent airhorn interruptions from Daly’s “Ed McMahon/fuck robot,” a taciturn machine that fans of the Fallout game series will recognize as F.I.S.T.O.)
Most of the cast members appearing on Fallout Fake Talkshow are in enough on the joke that Daly can’t completely throw them, with Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell both keeping their frustrations pretty clearly faux. That being said, the most recent episode—featuring guest star Macaulay Culkin—does seem to get genuinely uncomfortable in certain spots, to our eyes; Culkin makes an offhand reference to his brother Kieran, and Daly pounces on it, loudly declaring “Succession sucks!” and trying to get Culkin to join in. (He later pivots back to asking about teeth counts, sheepishly explaining “They told me to ask it!”) Fallout is an admittedly dark, and deliberately odd, show, but it’s still fascinating to see the Prime machine let Daly loose on it in quite such a delightfully aggressive way.
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