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It was 2014 when the first adaptation of The Last of Us was announced. Screen Gems, the studio behind all of the Resident Evil movies and also dozens of other horror films, was going to bring The Last of Us to the big screen. Of course, that never happened. Instead, the movie eventually ended up becoming a TV show that landed at HBO, and the rest is excellent storytelling.
The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us is GameSpot’s TV show of the year for 2023. Not only did it change the proverbial game by becoming easily the best live-action adaptation of a beloved video game, but it expanded the world in interesting ways and made us fall in love with new versions of Joel and Ellie.
Played to perfection by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, respectively, this new living version of Ellie and Joel are an emotionally powerful duo. When you then include the characters who were greatly expanded on for the show–Bill, Frank, Sam, Henry, and Riley, for instance–this show becomes overloaded with incredible character work from everyone involved.
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Episode 3, in particular, stands out as one of the absolute best episodes of television in years. It took what is mostly explored only in notes and scraps of paper in the game–the relationship between Bill and Frank–and transforms it into one of the most loving and tender storylines in modern TV. In a world as bleak as what’s on display in The Last of Us, it was refreshing to see such a wholesome love story blossom and thrive through the apocalypse. Those two characters were able to live their lives as they liked, enjoying the quiet and comforting embrace of their home, while the world fell apart around them.
It’s not just a single episode that makes The Last of Us our show of the year, though. Instead, it’s a series that seemingly did everything it could to appeal to fans of the series, while also reaching out to embrace those with no knowledge of the world. It used its pilot episode to expertly drop viewers into the horrifying situation at-hand, and spent the episodes that followed faithfully recreating many aspects of the original game, while throwing in enough twists and turns to keep us from getting too comfortable.
Now, looking forward, we aren’t sure what to expect. Will Season 2 bulldoze right into the second game, or will it tell some of the stories that surely happened in the years between the two games? Whatever happens, we hope to be as riveted as we were by Season 1.
