Prime VideoLike the infamous Torment Nexus, Hollywood has decided that fans who watch the strange, broken societies of dystopian sci-fi would love nothing more than to suffer through the misery themselves. In the spirit of turning commentary into reality, Amazon Prime Video recently released a teaser for Fallout Shelter, a reality competition series that thrusts everyday people into a simulated post-apocalyptic setting. Fallout: Shelter is already a free-to-play construction simulator that puts the player in charge of their own bunker as they manage the logistics of post-apocalyptic living. Amazon’s spinoff series, Fallout Shelter: The Experiment, sounds like it will have a similar format, but with real-life competitors. Check out the teaser below, then ask yourself at what point we stop paying homage and instead accidentally prove a point.“In Fallout Shelter: The Experiment, participants test their aptitude for the apocalypse in Vault-Tec’s state-of-the-art bomb-proof vault shelters,” the synopsis reads, per Deadline. “They will go head to head in a series of high-octane drills, psychological dilemmas, and morally challenging behavior trials until one special dweller emerges to win the prize of a lifetime — $1,000,000.”This is the latest in a recent stretch of reality shows based on fictional properties. 007: Road to a Million, a James Bond competition series, aired on Prime Video from 2023 through 2025, but the most infamous example, also from 2023, has to be Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge, which put real people through Squid Game’s murderous playground games. Eliminated players just had a squib of ink explode under their tracksuits instead of actually being shot, but it still felt like it missed the class overtones of the series it was based on. The Challenge ran for two seasons and was followed by Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, another whimsical reality competition series set in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Fallout Shelter: The Experiment follows in Squid Game: The Challenge’s dubious footsteps. | NetflixWhat do Fallout, Squid Game, and The Golden Ticket all have in common? They’re all dystopian stories. Yes, even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — the Oompa-Loompas were slaves, and most of the children were traumatized. The big trend in reality competitions is dystopian settings; maybe that’s a natural extension of the rise of “dark” reality TV like The Traitors, but it’s worth wondering why we want to make these terrifying worlds even more real. In a world where Mr. Beast already has one competitive reality show and now wants to make another based on The Hunger Games, we probably won’t see this trend end anytime soon. But maybe we should draw the line before Amazon acquires a few nukes just to make its show “more realistic.” Fallout Shelter: The Experiment premieres January 13, 2027, on Prime Video.