Let The Last of Us TV Show Be Different From the Games
Warning: This piece contains full spoilers for The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II.
The Last of Us is part of an ongoing craze of faithful video game adaptations with roots traceable all the way back to the original Silent Hill film. However, adapting a game like The Last of Us Part II is a bit different from adapting its predecessor, not just because it has a more complicated, fractured narrative, but also because it’s a (phenomenal) game with much more dramatic meat to explore, both in terms of sheer length and in the thornier dimensions it mines from its characters. To make a show that stands up to its inspiration, it most likely will have to make some major deviations from the source material. While diehard fans may cry foul, it might be the only way this adaptation can feel as vital as the game does.
It’s something co-showrunner Neil Druckmann, who is also creative director of The Last of Us games, agrees on. Talking to Variety about the adaptation process, he noted that a common mistake is “staying so close to the source material that is built and designed and written for this other medium that has strengths and weaknesses, and trying to translate it as is, with no changes to this other medium that has different strengths and weaknesses.” Looking at the newly released first trailer for Season 2, we can already see the first signs of how Druckmann and his creative partner Craig Mazin may have altered the original story to suit the television medium.
Season II.
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— Max (@StreamOnMax) September 26, 2024
Different Mediums, Different Priorities
With so many artistic mediums bleeding into each other these days, it can sometimes be hard to remember that video games and television are two very different things. Every medium for telling stories has pros and cons that are virtually inseparable from the form. The narrative techniques that make perfect sense in interactive fiction in regards to scene geography, atmosphere, environmental design, and use of player expression often don’t translate to something with a set runtime and no input from the viewer.
That’s not to say you can’t try. The first season of The Last of Us meticulously rebuilt many moments from the game’s cutscenes, sometimes literally frame by frame. But what purpose does that really serve? The story worked excellently the first time around, the game is available in its best ever form with The Last of Us Part I Remastered, and the cutscenes are readily available on YouTube. If people want a truly faithful version of the story, it’s already out there and has been for years. If anything, taking this cutscene cloning approach, rather than allowing the show’s direction and cinematography to present the story’s most critical moments in a wholly new way, only highlights the ways the original games frequently veered away from the strengths of interactive narrative. And it’s developer Naughty Dog’s adoption of non-interactive storytelling technique that makes such scenes so easy to plop directly into a TV show.
I say this as a massive fan of both games: they kind of already were HBO shows. They do use the possibilities of interactive storytelling to their advantage, but in terms of basic construction and scene direction, even during playable segments, there’s liberal use of the techniques and stylistic conventions of prestige television. This is why it isn’t just ironic that the games were eventually adapted as an HBO show; it was so easy to adapt them because the games did a lot of the work already. This is not to discount any of the contributions from the show’s directors, writers or performers, but the blueprint for a successful television show was already baked straight into the game. So if the next season wants to be its best self, it would do well to find a new way to present the story many of us already know.
Expand and Explore
Even with its fealty to the original game, the first season of The Last of Us often benefited from the deviations it did make. Hiring Latino actor Pedro Pascal gave a strong new take for main protagonist Joel by adding a softer dad-like quality to him compared to Troy Baker’s gruffer edge, adding new characters like Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen expanded the post-apocalyptic world explored in the original game, and devoting an entire episode to the unseen story of Bill (Nick Offerman) and his lover Frank (Murray Bartlett) led to what many considered to be the season’s best entry. Unlike a video game, which usually necessitates some kind of consistency to the player perspective through the controllable character, television affords the opportunity to shift focus more readily, and the show made great use of that in key areas.