The Last of Us

When HBO announced it was adapting The Last of Us, the question wasn’t whether it could be done but whether it should be. Video game adaptations had a long history of missing the mark, and turning a story built around player agency into a passive viewing experience felt like a gamble. Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann took that gamble and, for the most part, won big.

Premiering in January 2023, it became HBO’s most-watched debut season, pulling in tens of millions of viewers within weeks. Set twenty years after a fungal pandemic collapsed civilization, it follows Joel, a hardened smuggler, and Ellie, a teenage girl who may hold the key to a cure, as they cross what remains of the United States. Two seasons and sixteen episodes later, the show has earned widespread critical acclaim, a pile of Emmy nominations, and a dedicated audience, though Season 2 introduced some real fault lines in that consensus.

Where The Last of Us Excels

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey anchor everything. Pascal plays Joel with a quiet intensity that communicates years of loss without ever spelling it out, while Ramsey brings a sharpness and vulnerability to Ellie that makes the character feel lived-in from the first episode. Their chemistry is the show’s backbone. The small moments between them, a muttered joke, a loaded silence, a reluctant act of trust, carry more weight than any action sequence.

Smart risks with the source material define the writing at its best. Rather than translating the game beat for beat, Mazin and Druckmann expand on elements that the original medium could only hint at. Episode three of Season 1 is the clearest example. It steps away from the main story entirely to tell the story of two men building a life together during the apocalypse, and it became one of the most celebrated individual episodes of television in years. Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett deliver performances in that hour that earned Emmy recognition and demonstrated exactly what this adaptation could do when it trusted itself to go somewhere new.

Gustavo Santaolalla’s score, carried over from the original games, lands with even more force in a live-action context. The restrained, acoustic-driven compositions resist the temptation to overscore emotional moments, instead letting silence do as much work as the music itself. Combined with strong production design that builds a post-apocalyptic world full of overgrown cities and crumbling infrastructure, the show creates an atmosphere that is as haunting as it is compelling.

Supporting performances throughout both seasons add real texture. The show has a gift for introducing characters who appear for a single episode and leave a lasting impression. That ability to make you care about someone in under an hour, then move on, gives the world a sense of scale and humanity that a tighter focus on just Joel and Ellie wouldn’t achieve.

The Length Issues in The Last of Us

The most persistent criticism across both seasons is the scarcity of infected encounters. For a show set during a fungal apocalypse, the actual threat of the infected takes a backseat to human drama for long stretches. Viewers who came in expecting a survival horror show found something closer to a character study with occasional bursts of tension. That’s a valid creative choice, but it left a significant portion of the audience feeling like the world never felt as dangerous as it should.

Season 2 introduced bigger problems. At only seven episodes, it covers roughly half of the story from The Last of Us Part II, ending on what amounts to a cliffhanger. The pacing suffers as a result. Some episodes spend too much time positioning characters without giving new arrivals enough space to develop, which makes the season feel like an elaborate setup for a payoff that hasn’t arrived yet. Viewers who binged Season 1 as a complete, satisfying arc found Season 2’s structure frustrating.

Joel’s fate early in Season 2 became the most polarizing moment in the show’s run. The decision tracks with the source material, but condensing the buildup into a second episode left some viewers feeling like the emotional groundwork wasn’t there. The introduction of Abby and the shift in perspective that follows divided audiences sharply, with some praising the storytelling ambition and others feeling the show lost its center of gravity.

A few key sequences from the games were either cut or condensed for the adaptation, and their absence is felt most by fans of the source material. These omissions don’t break anything for new viewers, but they contribute to an occasional sense that the show is moving through its story faster than the material warrants.

The Moment That Changed Everything

Episode three of Season 1 is the single best argument for what a video game adaptation can become. By stepping completely outside the main plot and dedicating an entire hour to two characters who barely existed in the game, the show proved it wasn’t interested in being a faithful recreation. It wanted to be its own thing, and in that episode, it became something special.

That willingness to take creative swings defines the show at its best. When it commits to exploring the human cost of its world rather than just surviving in it, The Last of Us finds territory that most post-apocalyptic stories never reach. The problem is that this ambition isn’t always matched by the structural decisions around it, particularly in Season 2, where the swing toward a split perspective and a truncated episode count created more friction than momentum.

Should You Watch The Last of Us?

Anyone who values character-driven drama over action spectacle will find a lot to love here. This is a show that earns its emotional payoffs through patience and performance, not through set pieces, and it rewards the kind of close attention that prestige television demands. Fans of post-apocalyptic fiction who want something that focuses on the people rather than the disaster will feel right at home.

Skip it if you’re looking for a horror-forward survival show with constant tension and infected encounters. That’s not what this is. Also worth knowing: Season 2 ends without resolution, so starting now means committing to a story that won’t conclude until at least 2027.

The Verdict on The Last of Us

HBO’s The Last of Us turned a beloved video game into prestige television that stands on its own, powered by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s commanding performances and writing that treats its characters like real people navigating an impossible world. Season 1 is a near-flawless run of television that found ways to expand on its source material rather than simply replicate it. Season 2 stumbles with pacing and an incomplete arc across just seven episodes, leaving viewers in a holding pattern until the confirmed third season arrives. The highs here are extraordinary, and the show’s willingness to slow down and live inside quiet, devastating moments sets it apart from everything else in the post-apocalyptic space.