This is an excerpt from TV Guide Magazine’s The Last of Us: The Ultimate Survival Story special issue. For an in-depth look at the critically-acclaimed HBO series, featuring behind-the-scenes secrets and a preview of the highly anticipated second season, pick up a copy of the issue available on newsstands on April 11, or order online here.
Confession: For all the time I’ve spent in front of screens in my decades as a professional TV critic, I can count on one hand the minutes I have dwelt in the video-game universe. So I’m as guilty as anyone of underestimating the potential of The Last of Us when HBO offered journalists a first look at episodes in December 2022.
It was like receiving an early Christmas present when I became immediately immersed in the show’s harrowing and ennobling postapocalyptic world of soul-weary survivor Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and his spunky teenage “cargo,” Ellie (Bella Ramsey), as they travel across a blasted and perilous American landscape, encountering myriad dangers and pitfalls but also moments of grace, wonder and even beauty. (That giraffe!) I may be ignorant when it comes to video games, but I know a good story and great characters when I encounter them. And The Last of Us is one of the best in years.
The true successor to HBO’s Game of Thrones in terms of audience excitement and critical acclaim, the series transcends the realms of sci-fi/fantasy and horror with its profoundly felt humanity. As if Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy had secretly collaborated on a suspenseful, heartfelt road-trip adventure, The Last of Us also evokes the creature-feature genius of special effects masters like Ray Harryhausen and Rick Baker in its nightmarishly grotesque depiction of the fungus-infected human monsters.
Working in the Rodney Dangerfield of underappreciated genres, series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (cocreator of the original video game) quickly earned the sort of respect typically reserved for the most prestigious dramas, such as fellow HBO hits Succession, The White Lotus, and The Sopranos. It’s also rare that an edge-of-your-seat thriller earns commendation from the Peabody Awards.
Here’s how that revered board of judges showered praise on the show: “Post-apocalyptic settings have long haunted our fictions, reliably serving as an evocative canvas for artists to work out all manners of questions about the human experience while staging genre thrills along the way.… [The Last of Us is a] meditation on love and loss — and how love is capable of changing people, for good and for ill.” Like many admirers, including this one, the Peabody jury singled out the poignant third episode, “Long, Long Time,” which focuses on a nearly 20-year romance between two survivors, as the standout and a watershed event, concluding that the show deserved its accolades “for its creative achievements as a feat of cross-media translation, and for setting a new, high watermark for the artistic possibilities of video game adaptations.”
Liane Hentscher / HBO
The American Film Institute (on whose TV jury I sat) also honored the series as one of the 10 best of 2023, praising Mazin and Druckmann for “expertly expand[ing] the boundaries of each character, organically triggering deeply human fears that still run rampant in our post-pandemic world. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s found family provide the beating heart to this post-apocalyptic adventure that finds hope — and connection — as our only means of survival.”
Having earned 24 Emmy nominations for its first season and winning eight — including for guest actors Nick Offerman (as Bill in “Long, Long Time”) and Storm Reid (as Ellie’s friend Riley in the seventh episode, “Left Behind”) — there’s little doubt that The Last of Us has set a new standard for this brand of nail-biting yet thought-provoking narrative.
I was even reminded of my favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock, in the sensational first episode, where we spend roughly the first half-hour observing the end of the world on September 26, 2003, from the point-of-view of a character who, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, ultimately doesn’t survive, and whose death haunts the protagonist throughout. Our first glimpse of the terrors to come occurs from the limited perspective of a pickup truck’s back seat, a brilliant juxtaposition of the inexplicable and the banal. And quite the contrast with Ellie’s delight, some 20 years later, to ride in a car for the first time.
While I’ve been a fan of horror and suspense since childhood, the moments I relished most from Season 1 of The Last of Us weren’t the spine-tingling ones where our heroes hide from and combat those fungus-oozing monstrosities. What lingers are the scenes when Joel and Ellie, and others caught up in their tragic orbit, stop to savor what life and this ravaged Earth still have to offer. Reading from a book of groan-inducing puns or giggling as an exotic animal feeds from her palm, Ellie speaks for all of us when she answers Joel’s query, “Is it everything you hoped for?” by answering, “It’s got its ups and downs, but you can’t deny that view.”
My view: I’ll follow Joel and Ellie anywhere. It’s been a long wait for a second season, but I trust it will be worth it.
The Last of Us, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, April 13, 9/8c, HBO & Max
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