Nolan gave the task Stand out Showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet threading this special needle. The pair decided to center the series around three protagonists, played by Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell and Aaron Clifton Moten, who all enter the story at a turning point in their lives. A cowboy movie star turned ghoul, Goggins’ character is cold and lawless, a range of emotions one can imagine stemming from the loss he has felt in the 219 years since the first bombs fell. Moten is Maximus, a former orphan who joins the paramilitary technology protectors of the Brotherhood of Steel and gains a chance for greatness. Purnell is Lucy MacLean, a naive vault dweller who sets off into the wasteland in search of her kidnapped father (Kyle MacLachlan).
“All the dilemmas that the Brotherhood of Steel has faced over the years, the kind of quagmire and the different positions they’ve taken, it’s all interesting,” Wagner says. “In most cases Stand out In the games you start out as a vault dweller, so that made perfect sense since you start the series in a very small space and get to explore a crazy new world just like it is.”
The showrunners also made sure to include The Ghoul, a non-playable character, in the games. “That just felt like something we all wanted to see because they’re kind of the untouchables of the world Stand out world,” says Wagner.
As property, Stand out has always played with a kind of gallows humor, a satirical take on how terrible and complicated life could be after total nuclear annihilation. That’s certainly true of the series, which balances heartbreaking, child-delivered dialogue about mushroom cloud encroachment with “oh shit” sex jokes and an almost comical amount of carnage. Wagner says it was a tightrope act to set the tone for the series, knowing it had to be a little crazy at times and deadly serious at other times.
“We edited episodes where there were long stretches of no comedy because we felt like the story needed that, and it was just like, ‘Gosh, that’s a lot of apocalypse,'” he jokes. “We wanted to make the apocalypse a place we all wanted to go.”
However, for some viewers, it may seem as if the year 2024 is already on the verge of the apocalypse, making some of the series’ allusions and scenarios seem overly prescient. This is all coincidence, says Nolan, as the series began development in 2019, before Covid, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and before renewed hostilities in the Middle East. Still, he adds, the series “always felt like an opportunity to poke a finger into an open wound of humanity, which is the fact that we still haven’t figured out if we’re going to make it or if we’re going to make it.” will blow us to pieces.”
Humanity, says Wagner, is almost always in its “end is near” era. The apocalypse is a relative term. For some people, the apocalypse happened when women got jobs or started wearing pants. “The world is constantly in decline and we talk about it all the time,” he says. “We’re all just narcissists who think we’ll be there when the final curtain falls.”
However, Nolan assumes that the world is not ending anytime soon and says that it is Stand out The team has a plan for where the show should go if they are lucky enough to get a second season.
“In television,” says Nolan, “you have to be careful not to leave too much behind,” which he knows all too well as the creator of the popular and then canceled HBO series Westworld. “We just want to focus on making a great season of television. If it works out well and there is a chance to be there again, I really hope we get that chance.”