I thought about the story of Goldilocks a lot while watching the second season of Fallout. The post-apocalyptic video game adaptation was apparently a huge hit for Prime Video last year. Walton Goggins' performance as the gunslinging Ghoul, coupled with his work in The White Lotus Season Three, seemed to finally elevate him from everyone's favorite unpredictable character actor into a genuine star. But other than Goggins — in what was essentially a dual role, since we also see him in flashbacks as his pre-apocalypse self, cowboy movie hero Cooper Howard — the first season mostly kept me at arms length. Some of it was the ways in which it felt like a reconstituted, overly self-conscious mash-up of a lot of similar films and TV shows, but some of it, I couldn't quite put my finger on.
While viewing the new season's first six episodes, I finally landed on Goldilocks. As you almost certainly recall, Goldilocks is wandering through the woods, and comes upon a house where three bears live. They've gone out for a walk, and Goldilocks decides to break and enter and act like she owns the place. As she samples various chairs, bowls of porridge, and beds, she realizes that some of them are too hard, too soft, too hot, too cold, etc. But in each case, there's one that is just right.
To me, that's Fallout. Parts of the show are too silly to care about at all. Parts are oppressively glum. And every now and then — almost always involving Goggins — it gets the balance just right.