Who would have thought that Craig Mazin, writer of lowbrow comedies such as Scary Movie 3 & 4 and The Hangover Part II & III, would go on to create two of the best television series of the last decade? Chornobyl and The Last of Us are prestige TV of the highest order. His transition from trashy, broad comedy to award-winning, heart-wrenching drama is nothing short of astonishing.
Buy The Last Of Us: The Complete First Season 4K UHDBased upon a video game of the same name, The Last of Us is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been transformed by a fungal infection into zombie-like creatures. Set 20 years after the initial infection, it follows Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), a black-market smuggler who lost his daughter in the initial wave of infections, and a teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey) who appears to be immune to the virus, as they cross the country looking for Joel’s brother and perhaps a method of transforming Ellie’s immunity into a vaccine.
The series does a remarkable job moving back and forth between harrowing action sequences and quieter, dramatic character pieces. The intensity of its drama is regularly cut by some good comedy. Balance is the key, and The Last of Us has a perfect blend. Since the characters are constantly on the move, traveling across the country, its episodic structure allows our two main characters to meet a wide variety of people, never letting them, or us, settle into a tight rhythm. In its third episode, “Long, Long, Time,” it almost completely abandons Joel and Ella to tell the story of two gay men (portrayed by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett in knock-out performances) who have found a way to make a life filled with love despite the apocalypse. This also allows for a wonderful collection of great actors to appear and then disappear. Anna Torv plays Joel’s long-term partner in the first few episodes, Melanie Lynsky appears later as the leader of a rebel group known as Fireflies, and Graham Green and Elaine Miles have what amount to cameos as a couple of Native Americans living way out in an isolated cabin in Montana.
The great arc of the series is Joel learning that there is more to life than just surviving, you have to find a reason to live. Pascal is wonderfully grizzled and gruff as Joel, but it is Bella Ramsey who becomes the standout. She’s funny and sarcastic, inquisitive and caring. Ella is a person who has lived her entire life after the apocalypse. First inside a compound run by a militaristic, semi-fascist government agency called FEDRA, and then later across the country battling zombies and survivors who, if they find out she’s been bitten, won’t hesitate to shoot her in the head. Ramsey’s portrayal of Ella is wonderfully nuanced.
There are times when the series’s game origins are readily apparent. This is especially true in some of the action sequences, which are often staged like a shoot-em-up, and the monsters have a leveling-up quality to them. I’m not a gamer, and those moments were a little distracting to me, though I suppose for those who have played the game, those scenes might feel natural. But there was never a time when I felt lost, that I was missing some part that the game had explained but the series was leaving out.
Mazin co-wrote every episode with Neil Druckmann (who wrote the game) and they’ve created something truly special. This world feels fully lived in and our characters, even the ones that only exist for an episode, feel fully fleshed out. I love this series. It holds up too. I watched it when it first came out and then again for this review and unlike so much television, it got better on rewatch.
Warner Brothers previously released The Last of Us: The Complete First Season in 4K UHD. This is the same transfer and it still looks fantastic. I’d been watching the series with my family via a streaming service and while it looked good there, popping in this disc was a vast improvement.
Extras include the following:
- Controllers Down: Adapting The Last of Us
- From Levels to Live Action
- The Last of Us: Stranger Than Fiction
I have no idea how the series compares to the video game, but if the game is anywhere near as good as the show, I may have to buy me a PlayStation.
