Fallout review: Prime Video’s splashy, stupendously violent romp is the latest TV series based on a video game

And why wouldn’t we believe the man whose magnificent gangster drama is credited with starting a surge of nuanced, intelligent TV aimed at grown ups?

The Sopranos kicked open the door for a flood of prestige television, including The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Succession and more.

But in an interview with a UK newspaper on the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos in January, Chase suggested the door has slammed shut on the kind of complex, ambitious, sophisticated TV he and others made.

TV executives are now openly discouraging the kind of dramas that require the audience to focus. God forbid people should have to watch, listen and think all at the same time.

Describing the golden age as “a 25-year blip”, Chase added: “We seem to be confused and audiences can’t keep their minds on things, so we can’t make anything that makes too much sense, takes our attention and requires an audience to focus.

Fallout - Official Trailer | Prime Video

“And as for streaming executives? It is getting worse. We’re going back to where we were.”

US network television is mostly a dead loss these days: an endless procession of formulaic series about cops, doctors and firefighters that wouldn’t have looked out of place on TV 50 years ago.

But the streamers, which were supposed to represent the future of television, have a lot to answer for too.

Netflix used to produce quality series like House of Cards (at least until it got a bit too silly), Orange is the New Black and, more recently, Mindhunter. Nowadays it seems to be pumping most of its money into fantasy and science fiction series, many of them based on comic books, aimed at a teenage-to-twentysomething audience,

There’s nothing wrong with fantasy or sci-fi when it’s done well. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, for instance, is excellent TV, smart, gripping and unusual. But the majority of these things are mediocre.

Even HBO, home of The Sopranos and The Wire, and once the go-to destination for great, boundary-pushing drama, seems to have lost its nerve.

Westworld had its problems, certainly, but was cancelling production of the fifth and final season really justified, especially when the cast and crew still had to be paid in full for something they’d never get to make? It deserved to be allowed to properly wrap up the story, at least.

HBO also pulled the plug on Perry Mason, which had taken an old, established property (the 1950s and 60s series with Raymond Burr) and done something genuinely fresh and exciting with it, after two seasons. Typically, it was cancelled just as it had really hit its stride.

Meanwhile, Disney+ continues to churn out one Marvel or Star Wars spin-off after another, few of which have any reason to exist other than as a way of squeezing a few more dimes out of two thoroughly exhausted brands.

For those of us who crave more from television than spandex and spaceships, the good news is that even the most fervent fanboys seem to be growing tired of being relentlessly bombarded with sub-standard series

For those of us who crave more from television than spandex and spaceships, the good news is that even the most fervent fanboys seem to be growing tired of being relentlessly bombarded with sub-standard series.

Television has always been cyclical. What’s red hot one year can suddenly go stone cold the next. With prestige TV getting thinner on the ground and the sheen rapidly wearing off comic book-inspired capers, what comes next?

By the looks of it, the future lies in video games. HBO’s ecstatically-received The Last of Us did something that many thought impossible: it thrilled gamers (a hard-to-please community) and non-gamers alike.

Inevitably, its success has triggered a rush to find a video game property to turn into a TV blockbuster. Twisted Metal (Paramount+), an action comedy based on a demolition derby-style game, hasn’t exactly set the world alight, but hopes are higher for Fallout (Amazon Prime Video, from Thursday, April 11), which also puts the emphasis on humour.

It’s a splashy, stupendously violent, knockabout romp with pretensions to satire, set in an alt-history post-apocalyptic America of the 1950s. Right there, though, is the potential fly in the ointment.

Just how many post-apocalyptic shoot-’em-ups can viewers handle before getting bored? The golden age of TV may have been “a 25-year blip”; the age, golden or otherwise, of the video game adaptation could be a considerably shorter one.

Fallout is available on Prime Video from Thursday, April 11