I Already Miss ‘Fallout’: Did the Binge Watch Model Help the Prime Video Series or Hurt It?

Fine. I’ll say it. I miss Fallout.

The Prime Video television adaptation of Bethesda’s monumentally huge video game franchise premiered literally a month ago, on April 10, and I already feel the lack of it in my life. Like many others, I fell hard and fast for the show’s madcap vision of a post-nuclear hellscape, Ella Purnell‘s plucky heroine Lucy MacLean, Aaron Moten‘s adorably bumbling wannabe knight Maximus, and, of course, Walton Goggin‘s perversely sexy bounty-hunting Ghoul. Yes, like many others, I found the decaying corpse man with a penchant for violence and a hole where his nose should be hot.

I really, really loved watching Fallout! I lapped the series’s mix of violence and absurdity up. I found myself invested in the fates of its original characters. I binged the bejesus out of all eight episodes that Amazon unleashed on the world at once. And now…I miss it. Fallout was dominating the streaming charts and the conversation a mere month ago and now…nothing. Okay, maybe I saw one measly meme on a friend’s Instagram stories this week, but besides that, the culture has moved on to stuff like Baby Reindeer, Tom Brady roast jokes, hip hop rivalries, and how much we hate the new iPad commercial. Whereas another one of my favorite 2024 shows, Shōgun, lingered in the zeitgeist for months and is still birthing a myriad of “The Anjin says” memes.

Fallout’s debut was huge. It is the second most-streamed show in Prime Video history, right after their lavish Lord of the Rings series. But could Fallout have been even bigger had Amazon opted to rollout the series on a weekly schedule, as FX did for Shōgun or HBO does for House of the Dragon? Or was the secret to Fallout‘s success that delightful binge model?

In an April 30 article for Puck, streaming analytics expert Julia Alexander compared the strategies behind Netflix’s surprise smash Baby Reindeer and Prime Video’s Fallout. Both were released as a binge model, but Alexander wrote that she believed Amazon had sold itself short by dropping all of Fallout at once: “Amazon’s post-apocalyptic drama Fallout ticks all the boxes for a show that would have thrived as a weekly release but got blasted out all at once.”

While Alexander admitted that Fallout was still a success — “Fallout amassed more than 65 million views within its first two weeks across all episodes, and enjoyed the second-largest debut ever on Prime Video, sitting just behind The Rings of Power” — but that “[b]inge releases are always going to look better at the start.” The long tail of interest in Fallout has since stagnated and Amazon could have accumulated more viewership and cultural cache had they released episodes weekly. The only strategic reason Alexander could see for the binge drop was to create “a big show to highlight and support its recently instituted advertising tier ahead of its first Upfront bonanza in May.”

So, from a business perspective, Prime Video might have simply released Fallout Season 1 all at once to juice its initial numbers ahead of an Upfront presentation. They chose the short term big bang — no pun intended — over larger, longer, sustained growth.

But is there a creative argument for why Prime Video might have decided to gift all of Fallout to the fans at once? Decider’s own Fallout recapper, Sean T. Collins, opined in his episodic reviews that the series worked well as a binge-watch:

Fallout may be the first show I’ve ever watched that actually benefits from the standard streaming model of a simultaneous full-season release. Watching this show, moving from level to level and world to world, following Lucy and Maximus and the Ghoul and Norm on their side quests, getting those Cooper Howard cut-scene flashbacks: Watching Fallout feels like spending the weekend trying to beat a video game. 

And he’s right! One of the reasons why I enjoyed Fallout so much was the way it was episodically structured to raise the stakes, introduce new lore, incorporate new wrinkles, present new “missions” felt like progressing through a video game. Each new installment was like entering a new level of the game. The binge enhanced my enjoyment of the series.

So is it possible that Amazon was right to release Fallout all at once? Was it an aesthetic choice, designed to present the storytelling in the best light possible? Or was it a gambit to juice metrics before a big ad-sales push?

Either way, I know one thing. I wish I had new episode of Fallout to watch right now, a mere month since the show’s debut.