Watched episode three of The Last of Us tonight, the one everyone's going to be talking about tomorrow at work if their office is anything like mine used to be. It aired at 9pm and dropped on HBO Max at the same time, and I had it queued up before the opening logo even finished. My wife went to bed. I did not.
If you don't know the games: I've been playing this series since the original came out on PS3 in the summer of 2013, back when I was still lugging a console between apartments every time I moved. The 2013 game is one of maybe three things that made me actually respect what games could do as storytelling, not just spectacle. So when HBO announced they were adapting it with Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (who wrote the game) both attached, I was cautiously into it. Video game adaptations have a genuinely rotten track record, go watch the Uncharted movie from last year if you want proof that owning the IP isn't the hard part.
Episode three, "Long, Long Time," is not really an adaptation of anything specific from the game. It takes maybe a paragraph of background lore about a character named Bill and turns it into an hour-plus of television about Bill and a man named Frank building an entire life together during the apocalypse. Nick Offerman plays Bill. Murray Bartlett, who was so good in The White Lotus last year, plays Frank. There is barely any Joel and Ellie in it at all, which is a strange choice for episode three of nine, and it's the correct one anyway.
I won't spoil where it ends up. I'll just say I did not expect a zombie show to be the thing that got me a little wrecked on a Sunday night, sitting on the couch with the volume turned down low because my kid was asleep down the hall.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's a small one: HBO Max, the app itself, still buffers on my TV in a way that a $15.99-a-month ad-free subscription shouldn't buffer in 2023. It happened right at a quiet moment too, obviously, because that's how streaming apps work. I've had this complaint since Max relaunched from HBO Go a couple years back and nothing about it has gotten better that I can tell. Netflix doesn't do this to me. Disney+ barely does it. I don't know what's different about Warner's infrastructure but something is.
Anyway. People who only know this as "the zombie game" are going to be surprised by how much of the season so far has nothing to do with zombies, or the fungus, or any of that. It's mostly just people, and what they do to survive each other as much as the infected. The game did this too if you were paying attention, it's just easier to notice when you're not holding a controller and counting ammo at the same time.
One more thing before I close the laptop: I keep seeing takes online from people who've played the games getting mad about what changed. I get the impulse. I don't share it. The game is roughly thirteen hours built around player control and pacing, and a nine-episode TV season isn't that, and pretending it should copy the structure exactly would make for worse TV, not more faithful TV. Different medium, different job. I said basically this exact thing about the Watchmen show a few years back and got argued with in the comments here for about two weeks straight, so I'm sure I'll hear about it again this time too.
Going to bed. Episode four is apparently a full week away, which feels like a long time now.