The Last of Us

Name: The Last of Us
Genre: Drama

Twenty years after modern civilization has been destroyed, Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey, as they both must traverse the United States and depend on each other for survival.

ReleaseTBA

StatusTBA

NetworkHBO

Why it matters

HBO's third season takes on the back half of the second game, the stretch that split its players when it shipped in 2020.

About The Last of Us

HBO's The Last of Us adapts Naughty Dog's games, with Craig Mazin and the games' own director Neil Druckmann running it together. The first season followed a smuggler and a teenage girl crossing a wrecked United States twenty years after a fungal infection brought it down, with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in the parts. The second took up the much harder story of the 2020 sequel, which divided the people who played it when it shipped.

A third season covers the back half of that second game, the section the show deliberately held in reserve, and it is the part that decides whether the adaptation as a whole works. HBO has pointed to 2027, and the date is still to be confirmed. Expect a change of perspective rather than a straight continuation. Anyone who played the game knows what that means, and anyone who did not is better off not reading further.

Drama