Don't worry, The Fallout TV Show still apparently has plenty of anti-corporate energy, despite, you know, being on Amazon
The showrunners apparently love the irony that comes with showcasing the terrible effects of mega-corps via a mega-corp.
As you might be aware, one of the many themes of the Fallout series is that allowing a world to be filled with with lots of big corporations sucking up resources at an unsustainable rate in pursuit of endless growth will, er, probably not end well. Apparently, this is something the Fallout TV Show's creators were keen to capture, despite the fact the series is being released exclusively via the streaming service of, er, Amazon.
To be fair, it does very much sound like the show's creators are very aware of the dissonance that comes from projecting the message 'unchecked corporations bad' via the airwaves of a corportation that continues to expand to levels where interacting with it's basically unavoidable a lot of the time.
Speaking to TheGamer, showrunner Graham Wagner touched on how the show's creators have approached that issue. "For us, it was part of the appeal, the absurdity of that," he explained, "That we get to tell a story about a world that bet big on mega-corporations and it collapsed and put it on Amazon is too delicious for words."
The key to their philosphy was the desire to lean into the irony of that reality, while still striving to have the show feature plenty of what Wagner describes as the "peak '90s, Adbusters, anti-corporate energy" of the games. While I certainly don't envy the position the show's creators are in when it comes to being first folks to try and bring Fallout to a different screen, and there's every chance it does offer all of the anti-corporate satire we hope it will, it does seem a bit sad that this is where a lot of media ends up.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying the irony of these kinds of situations, and perhaps it's the most healthy way of looking at things, especially given that most of these games and shows we like are being sold to us by corporations of some kind anyway. Though, the whole thing does also kind of reflect that fact that it often feels like there's nothing we can really do about real-life corporations controlling a lot of the world around us, and regularly co-opting things we like to further those goals.
Anyway, sorry, you didn't come here to have someone do a discount Noam Chomsky impression, and as I say, there's every chance the show will deliver the scathing gags at the expense of companies like Vault-Tec and The Nuka-Cola Corporation that we all want.
In addition to anti-corporate satire, we also recently found out that the show will aim to show you a bit more of what life's like in the vault after a protagonist departs and feature a Megaton-inspired town set up around a giant trash heap.