‘The Last of Us’ May Be the First Zombie Show Worthy of Your Time

Can flesh-eating zombies make for good television?

HBO

In the last twenty years, Hollywood has seen its fair share of zombie shows. But from Z Nation to The Walking Dead and all of its various spinoffs, it doesn’t exactly demand a critical eye to see that these worlds teeming with reanimated corpses fall somewhere shy of great television.

The Walking Dead displayed a lot of potential in its early episodes, but as the story continued on, it had shed nearly every semblance of the once-promising show. By the time it reached its fourth season, few were willing to argue on its behalf. After only a couple seasons on the air, it seemed that the creative reservoir had begun to run dry.

There were only so many inventive new ways that The Walking Dead’s showrunners could conceive of to dispatch encroaching zombies — only so many safe zones that could be stumbled onto, sheltered inside of, and forfeited back to the army of walking cadavers. Writers ran out of perils to hurl at the protagonists and were hamstrung into recycling old ones.

Once the show stretched into an eleventh season and splintered into its sixth separate spinoff, even the people-eat-people world’s most die-hard fans had sorely accepted that enough was enough.

Trying to make my way through ten seasons of The Walking Dead was such a laborious task that I never mustered the strength to broach the eleventh. Fear The Walking Dead — the first of the spinoffs that emerged from the sprawling zombie universe — had lost its sense of novelty before the end of even its first season. There’s an excitement for fans in seeing the world initially fall apart instead of placing viewers right into the apocalyptic, raider-latticed aftermath. But once chaos ensues, one case becomes a billion in a matter of days and the show ends up simply feeling like more of the same old chase and bite. (Please forgive another zombie joke.)

Z Nation had some humor and originality going for it, but it wasn’t enough to engage most viewers beyond the first season. Each subsequent one averaged worse ratings than the previous.

For a long time, I wondered whether it was even possible to make a good zombie TV show. Maybe flesh-eating was a topic that was just meant to languish in the forgotten recesses of bad television alongside cheap sitcoms, trash dating shows, and daytime court dramas. But seeing the pilot of HBO’s The Last of Us in 2023 made me reconsider that notion.

Shows based on video games are something new in the world of TV. Appreciating just how big many of the most popular video game franchises have grown, and how much writing goes into them, maybe it should come as no surprise that Hollywood would look to cash in on the growing market.

For a long time, I shied away from these grittier, lore-heavy video games, opting instead for the vibrant worlds of Nintendo. But during the onset of lockdown in 2020, and with an unprecedented amount of free time at my disposal, I picked up The Last of Us. It was a momentous afternoon in early April; fear was in the air and toilet paper had been stripped from the shelves of every store within a ten mile radius.

But as Corona swept the country and panic and hysteria continued to dominate the atmosphere, I was deliriously and delightfully glued to my TV screen. The parasite-plagued world trivialized the inconveniences of life in quarantine. Fearing my pizza man might give my parents a respiratory disease was no stroll through the park, but it was a far cry from fending off the infected while foraging nearby stores. I could hardly marshal the energy to put my controller down during the most tense sequences— mounting wrist pain be damned.

From the gameplay, to the world, to the story told, it was clear I’d stumbled upon something revolutionary. I refused to set it aside until I’d played my way through its sequel, staying up each night until I heard morning birds. By the time all was said and done, I was nursing a foot-long beard and a hairdo more erratic than the world’s most famous physicist.

I had to continuously remind myself throughout the process that this emotional adventure I’d embarked on was part of something that could merely be called “video games.” The cutscenes were so well-acted and produced that they practically demanded popcorn, recliners, and enough time for my controller to go cold at my side. (I never minded.) Occasionally, gameplay only felt like a vehicle to reach the next part of the story.

Between the two games in the series, there are over 12 hours worth of these gripping cinematics. With so much material to pull from, there was likely no more deserving story for HBO to revivify.

In the TV adaptation of The Last of Us, the onset of the Cordyceps outbreak is deeply unnerving and scarily believable. The transition from normality to a world on the fritz is equal parts horrifying and magnetic.

In their best moments, Bella Ramsay and Pedro Pascal exude a level of humanity that elevates them above the virtual world of their source material. For a game that offered the most emotionally involved undertaking I’d ever found within the medium before, it’s no simple feat to achieve those same heights in a TV show, or to recreate the brush strokes that defined the original.

Few games have ever explored such emotional territory so expertly. The task of bringing Neil Druckman’s story to the big screen in a way that satisfied fans — while adding enough flourishes to keep the story fresh — has been anything but easy. Yet despite the high bar the original game set, this HBO take on the story has risen to the occasion in almost every conceivable regard.

Prior to playing The Last of Us, I didn’t realize it was possible to be so invested in the characters of a virtual world. But by the time I’d completed it, I’d been wrung through the emotional wringer a few times over. There were scenes intense enough that they pulled tears from even the most hardened Dark Souls players.

The Last of Us is poised to pack all the punches of the original and then some. But rather than faithfully following the plot line laid out within the video game, it departs from it enough to feel like its own story. Its twists and turns will be a surprise for even those already familiar with the general arc. But even in its departures from the original game, it’s still laced with enough subtle callbacks to it that it constantly rewards those who’ve actually played it.

Whether The Last of Us will stick the landing this second season — or stretch beyond its source material and burgeon out into a world of cash-grabs and spin-offs — is uncertain. But if the first two episodes of season two are any indicator, fans of flesh-devouring monsters may end up with the first truly worthy zombie show.

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