I’m still processing the fact that the Fallout TV show was good. Not even good, it was kind of great, and all that in spite of the fact that it hews so closely to Bethesda’s wacky vision of the Wasteland, which I’m just a little bit tired of.
I’m hardly alone in that estimation, of course. It felt like the whole world was raving about the show when it aired back in April, and it’s currently sitting pretty with a covetable 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. No wonder, then, that Amazon and Bethesda want to make hay while the sun shines: Filming for season 2 begins next month (via Screen Rant).
Fallout’s second season was greenlit barely a week after the show dropped on Prime and, per a chat Screen Rant had with Leslie Uggams—who plays Vault 33’s new Overseer Betty Pearson after Kyle MacLachlan goes missing—they’re getting right into it. “We start [shooting in] November,” she told Screen Rant. “I’m excited about it.”
Which is a much faster turnaround than the first season got, naturally. That one took two years to start filming after it was officially announced all the way back in July 2020, but of course it’s probably easier to get all your ducks in a row to shoot a TV series when you already have a load of props, a cast, and there isn’t a series of pandemic lockdowns across the entire planet.
Anyway, don’t get too optimistic about a release date. Sure, it’s a fast turnaround on shooting, but we live in an era where shows seem to take year-long hiatuses (hiatii?) as a matter of course. Think of shows like House of the Dragon, which aired first in 2022, took a break in 2023, then came back with a strangely foreshortened series earlier this year (writers’ strikes, admittedly, likely did not help that one in particular). Even Fallout’s first season took two years to hit our screen after it began shooting in 2022.
So don’t book your 2025 time off just yet, is all I’m saying. As for what Fallout season 2 will actually be about? Well, judging from the way the writers have been talking (and from the events at the end of the first season), it seems incredibly likely that New Vegas will put in some kind of appearance, which will give all of us New Vegas stans a great new opportunity to start crafting conspiracy theories about how Bethesda hates that game again. Plus, Uggams says her character has “some things up her sleeve,” so we can expect more Vault 33 shenanigans. Apart from that? My forecast is rapidly changing conditions.
