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So yeah, y’all probably knew this was coming. I waited until I got access to watch, and then I watched up through episode 5 (so I believe the halfway mark?) but it’s remained “on the rails” so to speak for long enough I’m going to stick my neck out and sing the praises of the HBO Max series adaptation of The Last of Us.
I haven’t played the video game and that’s mostly because I don’t have a Playstation and it’s only getting around to a steam release this year. This month in fact, looks like, which is good and most likely intentional timing. Anyhow that means I can’t speak first-hand to the faithfulness of the adaptation but I hear from people I’ve talked to that any changes made are for the better. Also there’s a side-by-side comparison Dawn watched on the Youtubes where certain scenes are not only the same dialogue but recreated shot-for-shot.
And yet the whole thing so far feels like someone dared showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann to do something conventional wisdom would hold is not possible: make a prestige television event out of not just a video game, but a video game where you sneak around shooting zombies.
That’s I’m sure reductive to the experience of the game, which received high praise… but there’s always that dot-dot-dot of “yes, it’s good… for a video game.” There is still a lot of controversy over whether a video game can ever reach “high art” (whatever that means) but now here we are with something you’d have to be an incredible snob to dismiss, even though a giant half-fungus man just ripped that dude’s head off. Call it the Game of Thrones of the zombie apocalypse (and I hope I didn’t just jinx the ending by writing that!).
Now you could argue that The Walking Dead was already an instance of zombie prestige TV, based off of a similarly denigrated art form (the comic book). But for me personally at least, the quality fell off a lot by the end of Season 1. It probably didn’t help that there were a lot of changes at the helm, especially the departure of Frank Darabont (which was planned or forced depending on who you ask). No question the series remained popular, and there’s no guarantee that I won’t fire up episode 6 of TLOU after I finish writing this and find everything going downhill… but so far so good. I really like how the apocalypse is presented and how the exposition is handled… there are enough clues to piece things together before the series gets around to confirming suspicions. And of course the main story itself taking place 20 years After The End has a resonance to me for obvious reasons. There’s a high body count but I feel again that early GoT comparison where they spend a long enough time with the characters that each death hits hard, and the first episode is a masterful demonstration of Hitchcock’s definition of suspense as you wait for the “bomb” to go off and the biting to begin.
I don’t imagine one well-done series will overturn decades of prejudice over what we should and shouldn’t consider art, but I am relishing that this exists. I am drinking deep of all my favorite genre tropes and post-apocalyptic vistas. Here’s hoping the prestigious biting continues all the way to the finale.