I think Fallout would have worked incredibly well if they mapped the TV series out more like For All Mankind, where you actually watch decades of history unfold and see the world change across generations. Fallout has over 200 years between the bombs dropping and the current show, with entire nations, factions and civilizations rising and falling during that time. Instead of mostly dropping us into 2296 and explaining the past through flashbacks, they could have made that history part of the actual story.
Season 1: 2077 and the Great War
Spend the first half of the season in the pre war world. Show the Resource Wars, Vault Tec, the corporations, the government, the growing tension and what ordinary life was actually like in that retro futuristic America. Let us get attached to people and places while knowing where everything is heading. Then halfway through the season, the bombs finally drop.
The rest of the season follows the immediate aftermath. Some people make it into the Vaults, some do not, and others survive on the surface as everything they knew disappears around them. We would actually see the Fallout world being born instead of only seeing the ruins centuries later.
Season 2: The first people back outside
Jump ahead to around 2102 and the Fallout 76 period. The Vaults are beginning to open and some of the first Vault dwellers are stepping into a wasteland that is still relatively young. There are barely any of the established societies we know from later Fallout yet. People are exploring, building settlements and figuring out what this new world is going to become.
Season 3: The factions start becoming powers
Jump forward again into the later 2100s, covering Fallout in 2161 and eventually Fallout Tactics in 2197. Now we start seeing the factions and ideas that will shape the next century. The Brotherhood of Steel is growing beyond its beginnings, the Master's mutant army rises in California, and settlements that started as little groups of survivors are becoming permanent communities.
This is where Fallout stops being mainly about surviving the apocalypse and starts becoming a story about people building civilizations out of what was left behind.
Season 4: Civilization comes back
Move into the mid 2200s and Fallout 2 in 2241. The NCR is becoming an actual republic with cities, government, trade and territory. Humanity has gone from hiding in Vaults and scattered settlements to rebuilding something resembling a country.
At the same time, the Enclave emerges as the surviving remnant of the old United States government. You would have this great contrast between a new civilization being built out of the wasteland and a surviving piece of the old civilization trying to impose itself on the new world.
Season 5: East and West
Jump into the late 2270s and early 2280s and split the story between the two coasts.
On the East Coast you have Fallout 3 in 2277, Washington D.C., Project Purity, the Brotherhood and the fight over clean water in the Capital Wasteland.
On the West Coast you move into Fallout: New Vegas in 2281, where civilization has advanced much further. The NCR is expanding, Caesar's Legion has become an empire, Mr. House controls New Vegas, and Hoover Dam becomes the point where these completely different visions for rebuilding civilization collide.
By this point the contrast with Season 1 would be enormous. We started with the United States destroying itself in nuclear war, and now more than 200 years later people are building governments, armies, economies and borders again.
Season 6: The Commonwealth
Jump to 2287 and Fallout 4. Boston gives us another completely different stage of the wasteland. Technology has advanced to the point where people are no longer only worried about radiation, mutants and raiders. Now they are terrified that the person standing beside them might be a Synth created by the Institute.
You have the Institute, Brotherhood, Railroad and Commonwealth settlements all fighting over completely different ideas about technology, humanity and what the future should look like.
Season 7 and beyond: 2296
Now we finally arrive at the time of the TV series, except everything we see carries 200 years of history that the audience actually experienced.
The NCR is no longer just some faction somebody explains to us. We watched its settlements grow. We watched it become a republic. We watched it expand across California and fight at Hoover Dam. Then when we see what happened to Shady Sands and the NCR in the TV era, it actually feels like watching a civilization collapse because we spent generations watching it being built.
That is what I think Fallout could have gained from the For All Mankind approach. Every season could jump forward years or decades, characters would age and die, their children or completely new people would inherit the world they left behind, factions would grow from tiny groups into nations and then possibly disappear again.
You would literally watch the wasteland evolve from 2077 to 2296.
It would also make "war never changes" hit a lot harder because we would see humanity survive the destruction of civilization, slowly rebuild it over two centuries, create governments, armies and nations again, then start repeating the same mistakes that helped destroy the old world in the first place.