For a while, The Last of Us was the pinnacle of video game to television adaptations, but Prime Video has a two-season post-apocalyptic thriller that’s beating HBO’s original series at its own game. When The Last of Us arrived in 2023, it was a surprise success to those who had carefully tracked the legacy of video game adaptations on television.

Successful video game to television TV shows before The Last of Us were animated shows, but even then, there were only a handful of acclaimed ones. In live-action, Gangs of London, Resident Evil, and Halo were just about the only “notable” series, and they were far from huge hits.

The Last of Us showed production companies that the right story and the right creative team could put together something incredible based on video games if given the chance. Frustratingly, The Last of Us season 2 did not hold up to quite the same scrutiny as the first, but by 2025, when it aired, there was already a replacement on streaming.

Fallout takes the lessons from The Last of Us and improves upon that series. This post-apocalyptic TV show is set in the world of the Fallout games, telling its own story but using all the bells and whistles of the franchise, of which there are plenty. The series has released its two seasons along a similar schedule to The Last of Us, and in season 2, it’s overtaken the HBO show.

Prime’s Fallout follows Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a pair of survivors living in the US hundreds of years after a nuclear apocalypse nearly destroyed the world, leading to the emergence of a retrofuturistic, post-war society. Like The Last of Us, Fallout is based on a post-apocalyptic video game series.

Unlike The Last of Us, Fallout doesn’t falter in season 2. While the first season of The Last of Us was an undeniable success and major event, the second season did not feel like such a step forward, possibly because of the story decisions it was forced to make as it followed the storyline of the games. Fallout has no such problems.

Fallout Season 2 Is Even Better Than Season 1 Despite The Viewership Drop

Fallout season 2 manages to bring more to the story than season 1 can, more than a lot of shows are able to. The first season of the show spends a lot of time explaining the scenario we find the characters in. There’s groundwork and exposition aplenty, and it takes away from our time with the story and the characters.

What’s worse, season 1 makes the mistake of separating Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell too often, making both their stories feel like less than the whole it could have been had they stuck together. Fallout season 2 wisely keeps the characters together for most of the season, allowing them to grow alongside one another.

Fallout gains more confidence in season 2, trusting the audience to go along with the absurd and the weird, which in turn ensures they are willing to go along with the emotion and moving moments of humanity, grief, and love. The Last of Us seems to lose some of its confidence, and season 2 feels smaller for it.

Oddly, it seems like the premiere week viewership numbers for Fallout went down between seasons 1 and 2, though that could have been because season 1 was released all at once, while Prime Video went for a weekly release schedule for season 2 (via Forbes). Both Fallout and The Last of Us have been renewed for a third season, and it will be interesting to see how they fare in comparison to one another and to previous seasons.