Graham Wagner

Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins make the grotesque wasteland of Fallout (2024) worth spending time in. We enjoyed their company enough to resent the detours that took us away from them. Even with that reservation, this is funny, carefully made television, and a persuasive reason to take an interest in Wagner’s writing. It is a promising move into genre storytelling for someone whose earlier credits are concentrated in television comedy.

Before that came writing and producing on The Office (2005), whose staff he joined in 2012. Steve Carell’s painfully needy boss accounts for much of our affection for that programme, so its pleasures cannot simply be credited to one member of the writing team. Wagner’s work there included refining jokes and delivery with actors on set. He also wrote and produced for Portlandia between 2014 and 2018, and for Silicon Valley in 2017.

On Fallout, he shares the larger responsibility of co-creator and co-showrunner with Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Their satire centres on human behaviour and factions rather than broad jokes, carrying his comedy background into a post-apocalyptic setting. Their writing process moves between the two of them as they refine the tone. The humour works well enough for us to welcome the change of setting; there is more here than the novelty of a comedy writer tackling genre material.

The storytelling needs firmer handling. Fallout repeatedly transfers our attention between three strands without developing the people in each evenly enough to make every switch welcome. Ali Comperchio and Yoni Reiss are among the editors keeping those strands intelligible, but the cutting cannot make every detour necessary. The writing supplies mysteries to follow while sometimes neglecting the urgency of what is happening now. Start with Fallout, and allow its cast a little more patience than its plotting deserves.