The 'Last of Us TV show

2023 - 1 - 10

The Last of Us

Post cover — Image courtesy of "Radio Times"

The Last of Us review: A fantastic TV show in its own right (Radio Times)

Let's not undersell it. Bella Ramsey as Ellie and Pedro Pascal as Joel in The Last of Us. Sky Atlantic/HBO.

And if you like the games, you'll love seeing this prestige TV adaptation, complete with one of the most unskippable title sequences in recent memory — no word of a lie, this blend of earworm music and eye-catching visuals puts House of the Dragon's opening credits to shame. If you're on the fence about watching it, do yourself a favour and get involved as soon as possible. Joel and Ellie are the heart of the story, and your own heart will grow a few sizes as you watch them bond, but there is a lot else going on besides their bantering and bickering. This scene is highly effective in ramping up the scares, while a later horde-sized problem reminds you of just how big this outbreak was. If you've never played the games, you'll get to experience a brilliant piece of genre storytelling for the first time, with top-notch performances at every turn and heaps of character drama. Speaking of the action scenes, what's refreshing here is that they're few and far between, used sparingly in a really wise way. [The Last of Us TV show](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/last-of-us-tv-show-release-date/) the best video game adaptation of all time would be underselling it. And that's a good thing, considering that a fair amount of the show's audience may never have experienced this story before. [the first game](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Us-Part-I/dp/B0B4D7STV7/?tag=radtim0b-21&ascsubtag=radiotimes-1765566) in Naughty Dog's PlayStation franchise), but what's impressive is how well the show hangs together in spite of that. It's long been heralded as one of the best stories in gaming, and that core narrative still holds up marvellously in this new format. This is a faithful adaptation 90 per cent of the time. Impressively, showrunners Neil Druckmann (who wrote both the games) and Craig Mazin (who masterminded HBO's brilliant Chernobyl series) have found ways to expand on the source material in meaningful ways.

The Last of Us review: 'The best video game adaptation ever' (BBC News)

Based on the PlayStation game, about a man and a teenage girl travelling through the US during a zombie apocalypse, this HBO show is a remarkable ...

There are certain scenes early on that feel too gamey for television (such as those where Joel and Ellie are sneaking around a museum), while the latter half of the series feels like it needs one more episode to even out the pace (scenes involving the infected are strangely scarce beyond episode five). It is a sentiment that is turned inside-out in episodes four and five, which follow Joel and Ellie as they make their way through the aftermath of a bloody uprising against an especially fascistic branch of FEDRA in Kansas City. These episodes also feature some of the show's best action sequences, including a huge set-piece involving the infected that is as grisly and gripping as any in the game. The show essentially lives or dies on the casting of Ellie, who is as playful and profane as she is endearingly obnoxious. Set across two decades, it follows paranoid prepper Bill (Nick Offerman) as he strikes up a relationship with Frank (The White Lotus' Murray Bartlett), a man who stumbles into one of his many traps. But Pascal is also a sensitive, soulful actor, and seeing Joel soften and thaw throughout the series is one of its great pleasures. The humour is much needed in the bleak, violent world that they traverse, where people are just as dangerous as the infected. It is a faithful adaptation in everything from look to score to feel, with the early episodes in particular following the game almost beat-for-beat. It is around this time that we're reintroduced to an older, more grizzled Joel, changed by the things he has had to do to survive. It follows a hardened smuggler named Joel, played in the show by Pedro Pascal, who has been tasked with escorting across the country Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenage girl with an apparent rare immunity to the infection. In an interview with The New Yorker, creator Neil Druckmann recalled how, in 2014, a film adaptation fell through because executives wanted to make it bigger and "sexier", like the Brad Pitt film World War Z. Neither of which is the case for HBO's remarkable nine-part adaptation of The Last of Us, generally regarded as one of the greatest video game stories ever told.

'The Last of Us' Review: All Flesh, No Bones (slantmagazine)

Rending the gameplay out of a game that's fleshed out by televisual tropes, the series ends up as mostly just the latter. by Pat Brown. January 10, 2023.

The underwhelming confrontations with the zombies may be one crucial aspect of why this adaptation fails to accomplish the dramatic heights that the game did. The result is a series that not only often runs like a compilation of extended versions of the game’s cutscenes, but is also almost assertively middlebrow. Take the fifth episode, in which Joel and Ellie confront a cult of personality led by would-be authoritarian Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) in Kansas City. In the second episode of the season, after the initial job to hand Ellie over to the Fireflies on the outskirts of Boston goes belly-up, he resolves to help her find her way to a medical facility in Utah. Many stretches of the game that staged memorable battles with hordes of zombies—like Elie and Joel’s run-in with Joel’s smuggling contact, Bill (Nick Offerman), outside of Boston—are reconceptualized in the terms of prestige television. The journey there becomes a tour of the various mini-dystopias that have sprung up in the two decades since society collapsed.

The Last of Us is already the best tv show of 2023 (British GQ)

The Last of Us, HBO's mega-money adaptation of Naughty Dog's post-apocalyptic PlayStation odyssey, isn't just the best video game adaptation ever made.

[Pedro Pascal](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/pedro-pascal-interview-2022), the internet's favourite gruff dad, was lined up to play Joel, the internet's other favourite gruff dad. We begin the series from the perspective of Sarah (Nico Parker), a young girl living in rural Texas with her dad, Joel, and her uncle, Tommy (Gabriel Luna). For one, we begin in 2003, America very much in the new age of terror (they've seen nothing yet, of course), rather than 2013. [video game](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/gallery/best-games-2023) adaptations, even when everything is there to suggest otherwise. The game itself is considered one of, if not the best ever made. Take [The Last of Us](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-last-of-us-tv-series), HBO's mega-money gambit to bring one of the most celebrated masterpieces of the genre to the small screen.

HBO Confidently Adapts Breakthrough Video Game The Last of Us ... (Roger Ebert)

One of the most cinematic games of all time is Sony and Naughty Dog's "The Last of Us," which launched in 2013 and became an instant critical and commercial hit ...

In many ways, it's a perfect story for where we are in 2023, picking up the pieces of the last few years and finding what's important to us again. I wanted a little more building, and the show rushes the final two episodes in a way that made me wonder if that's where most of the compression happened when it lost a chapter from the initial ten episodes that Mazin said would happen back in July 2021. In terms of storytelling and design, the show will be very familiar to gamers, almost too much at times. After a chilling prologue in which an expert on a talk show offers his belief that the world-ending pandemic will be fungal and not viral, "The Last of Us" opens properly in 2003, hours before society's collapse. [Pedro Pascal](/cast-and-crew/pedro-pascal)), an Austin-based contractor, and his brother Tommy ( [Gabriel Luna](/cast-and-crew/gabriel-luna)). It's a fascinating deconstruction of the game that leans on character and storytelling instead of action, and it does so in a way that's confidently grounded.

The Last of Us Will Invade Your Psyche (Vulture)

A review of the HBO series The Last of Us, based on the video game and starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.

But the series reminds us why postapocalyptic stories continue to invade our psyches: They remind us of the value of being alive and how terrifying it would be to stand among the few who still are. Like the dystopian prestige dramas The Leftovers and Station Eleven, The Last of Us is driven less by raw plot than by its study of relationships. Even if The Last of Us treads familiar ground, it is still a gripping and ambitious work that seems fated to become the premium cable network’s next Twitter-trending hit. The other lies in translating the inherently interactive experience of a game into something that feels unique to television. [reportedly exceeding](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/can-the-last-of-us-break-the-curse-of-bad-video-game-adaptations) each of the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, The Last of Us is punctuated by intense action sequences and elaborately rendered practical and visual effects. The nine-episode first season, which debuts on Sunday night, focuses on Joel (Pedro Pascal), a man who lost his daughter when the pandemic began in 2003, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager whose immunity to the fungus could be instrumental in finding a cure in 2023.

The Last Of Us (Empire)

In 2003, an outbreak of an infectious fungus that turns human hosts into deadly monsters leaves the world in ruins. Twenty years later, survivor Joel ...

One of the game’s key strengths was its depth of character, and that’s only intensified here. To say more might spoil the experience; suffice to say that it is moving, surprisingly romantic, and one of the finest hours of television in recent memory. And yet for all its vast canvas, for all its monster mayhem, the focus remains at all times on the characters. He’s re-imagined here as a survivalist and occasional conspiracy nutter who prepared for zombies his entire life, proving it possible to eke out a good dystopia from the ruins of the world. The live-action The Last Of Us is a superb example of how to make an adaptation work, how to retain the elements of what worked while having the confidence to explore bold new avenues, to expand the universe, to make a thing that stands on its own two feet. Clearly aware they are working from a pretty bloody strong template — and perhaps also conscious of pleasing the game’s aggressively loyal fan base — Druckmann and Mazin have hewed relatively closely to the original narrative.