Spoilers ahead for the series premiere of The Last of Us.
The long-awaited HBO adaptation of popular video game series The Last of Us has finally debuted its first episode, with Pedro Pascal starring opposite Bella Ramsey. While fans of the game played their way through a violent landscape, the 90-minute series premiere was relatively light on the violence in comparison. Show co-creator and game writer/director Neil Druckmann opened up about why it was an easy decision to tone down the bloodshed in the HBO adaptation.
The co-creator had previewed before that the series would only include the essential violence. Speaking with Variety about the first episode, Neil Druckmann opened up about the difference between watching a show and playing a game. He said:
There’s different kinds of emotions you could draw from the player through an interactive space — where they swing the camera to, how they’re approaching the obstacle in front of them. When you’re playing those sequences, that immersion really makes you connect with the player you’re controlling. Everything is only seen through their perspective. If we were to shoot those sequences as is, they would make for pretty boring action sequences. So one of the easiest decisions we made was like to say, ‘Let’s strip all those out. Let’s only have as much violence in this story as is required and no more.’ That allows the violence to have even more impact when you see it on screen than in the game.
While there was plenty of violence to go around in the first episode (up to and including Joel beating somebody to death after sneaking out of the Quarantine Zone), none of it felt gratuitous. Instead, it was fully in service to the story and developing the characters before and after the world as they knew it ended. The early bloodshed worked as world-building to show how everything went wrong, as well as what happened to Sarah. Actress Nico Parker even opened up about getting to show more of Sarah and her bond with her dad before her death.
None of this is to say that Joel and Ellie’s journey is going to be easy, even if viewers aren’t getting as much violence as is included in the video game. It's promising that Neil Druckmann is so optimistic about stripping unnecessary action sequences out; who better to trust on an adaptation than one of the people who helped create the world in the first place? Based on reactions so far, the premiere was a hit with gamers who already knew at least some of what to expect as well as with newcomers who may have just expected another zombie TV show.
The people affected by the Cordyceps fungus in the show definitely aren’t just zombies like the creatures that just made the end of the world worse and worse for more than a decade on The Walking Dead, which ended earlier this year. (Several spinoffs are in the works, however, including one centered on Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan and Lauren Cohan’s Maggie.) A prologue at the beginning of The Last of Us delivered the exposition about why a fungus could be the threat that humanity can’t defeat, and the rest of the episode demonstrated why the people affected could be even scarier than zombies in the long run.
Of course, “the long run” at the moment only consists of the rest of the first season, which received an order from HBO for nine episodes. Even though the creators have already explained ways the show will defy Game of Thrones comparisons with the story, hopefully the network follows the precedent of House of the Dragon and announces a renewal quickly after the premiere!
For now, you can look forward to what comes next on The Last of Us with new episodes on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO or streaming with an HBO Max subscription. For some more viewing options now and in the coming weeks, be sure to check out our 2023 TV premiere schedule.
