Prime Video’s Fallout show is emerging from the Vault next April

The series, reportedly a canonical part of franchise history (according to Variety), will take place in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles and center around the denizens of Vault 33—one of dozens of underground bunkers hidden around the United States that “saved” people from a nuclear war, though most of the Vaults were actually secret social experiments designed to see how people would react to, say, living in a VR simulation of ‘50s suburbia, or being surrounded by clones of the same guy, or some kind of Shirley Jackson thing where someone had to be sacrificed once a year. So you survive, hooray, but shit still sucks.

We don’t know what the deal is with Vault 33, but the series will star Walton Goggins as one of the series’ many irradiated ghouls (who often look scarier than they behave), along with Ella Purnell, Kyle MacLachlan, Xelia Mendes-Jones and Aaron Moten. It comes from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan (who directed the first few episodes) and Lisa Joy, with Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner serving as writers and co-showrunners. Curiously, Variety referred to the series as a drama, but the games have always been deeply satirical and occasionally very wacky, so we don’t know if the show is going for something more traditionally dark or if Variety is just calling it a drama because it’s a show about a post-nuclear war wasteland full of Super Mutants and Mister Handy robots and hardscrabble societies that use old bottle caps as money.