Fallout
Prime Video
The Regime
Sky Atlantic
Meet the Roman Emperor
BBC2
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Sky Comedy
The first computer game with which I was ever truly, hopelessly obsessed was the space epic Elite. This would have been in the mid-1980s, and on my Acorn Electron with its tape deck and 32k of RAM. So complex and rich was the world of Elite — the spaceships, the diverse planets, the pirates, the multiple galaxies — that the game box included an actual tie-in novella, just to get you in the mood. I devoured Elite. I lived it like a second life. And yet the game itself was merely a series of black-and-white lines and shapes, assisted by the odd rasping beep. It was all in the mind.
Advertisement
Once, the most immersive of games required more of your own imagination than a novel. Today, with advancing graphics and all the rest, they probably require less than a film. Even now, though, the narrative creativity and world-building behind games is usually underestimated. Last year HBO had a smash hit with The Last of Us. It was beautiful, sad, moving, thoughtful, and also based on a game released on Sony PlayStation in 2013. For many of us under the age of 40, I’d imagine that felt rather incongruous. But only because we are fools.
Now it’s the turn of Fallout, based on a franchise of games which began in 1997. Since then a vast, sprawling backstory has been growing and evolving. Some of this I’ll get wrong, but humour me, and humour yourself, too. The year is 2296, long after a nuclear war that ended society as we (sort of; we’ll come back to this) know it. The bulk of mankind now scratches out a bitter existence among irradiated wastelands. Below the surface, however, a select few survive in a series of massive, isolated vaults, devoted to keeping civilisation alive until the Earth recovers.
The chief streak of genius in Fallout lies in the way that this world’s reality diverged from our own not with the war, but beforehand, in the 1950s. This makes the technology and aesthetics we see both familiar and eerily different. The word you want here is “retrofuturism”; the future as glimpsed from the past. There are no flatscreens or lasers, nor digital technology generally. Instead we have big lumps of metal, cathode-ray TVs and endless pumping valves. There are computers, yes, but they all look like vintage ones from the moon landing. Nothing beeps, but everything clunks.
Down in the vaults, however, it’s not just technology that has ossified. It is also society. Lucy (Ella Purnell) is, in a way, your template 1950s American princess. One of our key heroes, she’s wholesome, moral and polite. Or at least, up to a point. Raised in Vault 33, she has always known that one day she would be married to a stranger from another vault, to continue pure humanity without interbreeding. There’s a streak of Brave New World progressivism here, too, because while she has indeed had a sex life until now, it has merely involved what she refers to as “cousin stuff”. We meet her as — with all the excitement you’d expect from a horny Sandy from Grease — she’s looking forward to the real deal.
I won’t tell you what happens next, because it would ruin the quite brilliant first episode of Fallout. Let’s just say, though, that she realises something’s amiss when her new husband wipes his genitals on the curtains after sex. And before long, Lucy will be out in the world.
Advertisement
Fallout, though, is not just her story. There’s also Maximus (Aaron Moten) who is a surface-dwelling novice in an order of warrior monks, who clunk around in robot bodysuits. His job, at least at first, is to follow around a knight carrying everything, like an insane parody of a golf caddy. Plus, there’s the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a radioactive mutant bounty hunter who seems to have been alive — after a fashion — since the big bomb dropped. He has no nose, which appears to be a frequent problem for mutants. He’s also perhaps a little too similar to Ed Harris’s the Man in Black from Westworld, although that’s unsurprising, because Fallout is in many ways Westworld’s follow-up, made by the same team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.
Having started so well, Westworld went unwatchably and quite boringly mad. With so much more source material to draw on, Fallout may not. For the first few episodes you may feel there’s a bit too much going on, with too many characters to meet and too much backstory to learn. Every bit of it, though, is just so rich. “I grew up on a fly farm,” one quite minor character explains. “I was a shitter. They’d feed us and then feed our shit to the flies.” I mean, would that even work? With calories in and calories out? These are the sorts of questions that, while you watch, you’ll barely have time to ponder.
Something deeply sinister is going on with the Vaults, which are initially a bit like The Good Place, and — without wishing to spoil The Good Place — may end up being even more like it. The core conceit, either way, is just beautiful, plunging a character essentially from America’s uptight golden age into the most vile and broken America imaginable. How can it be that, for so many years, the gamers had all this to themselves?
The Regime was probably not quite what you were expecting it to be. It’s a satire of a nameless European authoritarian state from Will Tracy, who worked on Succession, and stars Kate Winslet as a tyrant. From that, I’d imagine you’d anticipate something similar to, say, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin. Actually, it’s far more odd.
Winslet’s chancellor Elena is magnetic. Think Penny Mordaunt at the coronation, but if the coronation had been in Belarus and then Mordaunt launched a coup. Winslet has done something with her mouth, making it hard and inflexible down below, with shades of Diane Morgan’s Mandy, but in a scary way. Sometimes she’s a bit like Margaret Thatcher, but she’s also like Jennifer Saunders in Absolutely Fabulous. None of which is to suggest she’s derivative. It’s better than that. She’s instantly familiar, but it’s hard to pin down why.
Advertisement
She’s also nuts, racked by health-related obsessions and with a terror of mould. Into her life comes Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), recently disgraced for his part in a massacre down a mine. Initially, his job is to follow her around, testing air humidity. Swiftly, though, he morphs into her bodyguard, confidante and chief adviser. Sort of like a thug Rasputin. The various yes-people of her inner circle scatter in alarm. The only real, solid constant is Agnes (Andrea Riseborough), the unflappable palace housekeeper.
Often, The Regime is enormously funny, but it’s an unusual sort of funny, apt to make you goggle or gasp rather than laugh. To call it “dry” would be an understatement; it’s desiccated. Early on Elena’s French husband (Guillaume Gallienne) explains politely to some visiting dignitaries how he had a pregnant wife when he met her, whom he then left and never saw again. At night Zubak and Elena meet in their dreams, which they discuss afterwards. If you’re after neat romp and farce, all this may leave you a little baffled. Tyranny, though, is odd by definition. Rule by whim is whimsical. Nothing here quite fits in a box — apart from Elena’s dead father, who has been desiccated too, and is in a glass one — but nor, I think, is it supposed to. After a couple of episodes you may find Elena and Zubak in your own dreams too.
On BBC2 Mary Beard was telling us about the intimate lives of Roman emperors (Meet the Roman Emperor). I mean, of course she was. She was back in Rome and back in her golden trainers, and this is where Beard belongs.
The big takeaway here was that being an emperor was pretty horrible. If you weren’t mad to start with, you swiftly went that way. The first 12 emperors, she told us, were rumoured to have been murdered. For Claudius, this involved eating poisoned mushrooms, leading to his final words which, Beard said, “can only be translated as, ‘Blimey, I think I’ve shat myself’”.
Beard told us this stuff with a distinctive sort of relish, as also seen when she was translating fruity graffiti by gay slaves. What with slaves not being emperors, I honestly think she included a section on them only as an excuse to do this. We also learnt that the suppository was invented by the physician Galen to cure the stomach ache of Marcus Aurelius. That’s a bold thing to suggest to an emperor, eh?
Advertisement
Perhaps the most interesting bit was her discussion of kissing in the Roman court, which happened so much that Domitian once banned it because of an outbreak of herpes. Favourites would kiss the boss on the cheek or mouth, supplicants on the hand, and the dregs on the feet. Beard also spoke to a modern-day etiquette expert, who compared this with how we shake hands today; how the powerful have their palm facing down, while the weak present theirs upwards. Do we? News to me. I shall never comfortably shake hands again.
Finally, an ending, as Curb Your Enthusiasm hung up its shoes (probably stolen from a Holocaust museum) after 12 seasons and 24 years. If you haven’t been following the long arc of this latest series, Larry David is on trial after illegally providing water to a voter in a line at the ballots in Atlanta. As in, after so many years of stumbling into being a villain he has now, equally unwillingly, stumbled into being a liberal hero.
As a finale, the shape of this harked back to the end of Seinfeld, David’s former creation, which famously — or perhaps, infamously — ended with a trial too. Many feel it never quite worked. This one tackled that head on, with Seinfeld turning up to join in. The prosecuting lawyer rehashed many of David’s lowest highlights, from the Holocaust shoes to the coffee shop he burnt down to the portrait of Jesus on which he urinated to allegedly giving Bruce Springsteen Covid and — surely everybody’s favourite — the funeral notice where “beloved aunt” had lost the a and picked up a c. “Yes, Larry David did a lot of things wrong,” his lawyer insisted, “but this time he did something right.” But would anyone care?
All of this, by definition, was self-indulgent as hell. Diving back in at the start of this series, I was a little disappointed by the sameyness of it. Saturated by the end, I find I’ve remembered that the sameyness was always the point. Curb has always been a sitcom primarily about itself, and it gave us a finale that was entirely so. David, of course, has been promising to end the show for years, only to keep coming back. I don’t think, though, that there’s any coming back from this.
Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer , the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don’t forget to check our critics’ choices to what to watch this week, the best shows of 2024 so far and browse our comprehensive TV guide