The Last of Us
What a show! Some of the best writing I have come across for ages... If you didn’t already know The Last of Us was adapted from a video game, you would never have cottoned on that the new series had its origins in pixels. In some ways, the marriage of The Last of Us and HBO makes a lot of sense. The 2013 title (and its 2020 sequel) is one of the most acclaimed games in history, and primarily for its sophistication in storytelling.
HBO remains a brand you can still reliably associate with prestige TV, favouring projects with depth over spectacle. And TV doesn’t come much more prestige-y than The Last of Us.
Neil Druckmann’s game already had a clear narrative path, rich character arcs and layers of emotional stakes. Which should, in theory, make it much easier to adapt for a TV series.
But, of course, there’s an elephant’s graveyard of failed video game adaptations, even of ones that were praised for being “cinematic” in their story and visual ambitions.
The Last of Us, which streams in Australia on Binge*, finally breaks that curse. It is a superb TV series which invests in its characters’ stories, their inner lives, and builds a complex relationship between its two leads. It also creates a grim, grey world in which moral compromises are as common as deadly perils.
Plus, it’ll make you cry. Repeatedly.
Joel (Pedro Pascal) has suffered great loss – shown in the series’ vivid and breathtaking opening 35 minutes – and has spent the past two decades barely surviving as a smuggler. He and his partner Tess (Anna Torv) have crossed lines they would never have considered breaching before the apocalypse, and The Last of Us functions, on one level, as a redemption tale.
From his base in Boston, now a quarantine zone under the control of a fascist military government, Joel reluctantly agrees to take on a mission from the rebel group the Fireflies. He needs the Fireflies’ resources to go out west and find his brother (Diego Luna), last heard from in Wyoming.
And the Fireflies need Joel to transport precious “cargo” across the country. That cargo is a person and she has a name: a 14-year-old girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who is immune to the cordyceps infection and might be the key to a cure or a vaccine.
Ellie, as played by the scene-stealing Ramsey (Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones), isn’t a passive character whose fate has been decided by adults. She has agency, she often drives the action, and she has a dangerous edge that hints at what’s to come.
Joel may be laconic but Pascal’s (The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones) soulful performance gives the character depth, as if all of his past regrets, crimes and traumas are just simmering under the surface. It’s a subtle portrayal but it screams volumes.
The series also spends episodes centred on the people Joel and Ellie meet – and many of them actually pull focus away from the leads in almost self-contained stories. There are exceptional performances from the likes of Melanie Lynskey, Storm Reid and Lamar Johnson.
The standouts are Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett – the pair star in the poignant third episode of the series, which is arguably the show’s best.
But what ties all these character studies together is Druckman and co-creator Craig Mazin’s vision of this shadowy world where morality is constantly litigated.
Much like Mazin’s other series, Chernobyl, what’s right and what’s wrong are not fixed points in an environment where survival trumps everything.
That makes for irresistible TV and that makes The Last of Us the first great TV show of 2023. Those that follow will find it hard to do better.