If you’re a fan of video games, you can hardly have been impressed by the current spate of television adaptations. From Paramount Plus’s anaemic Halo to Netflix’s short-lived and by-the-numbers Resident Evil, gamers have been served poorly by TV executives. So, when the news emerged that Craig Mazin, writer of the critically acclaimed Chernobyl mini-series, would be joining forces with Neil Druckmann, creator of one of the most revered games in the history of the format, well, expectations were tempered. So it is with a breezily unencumbered swagger that HBO’s epic reimagining of The Last of Us arrives this month on small screens.
Pedro Pascal is Joel, a taciturn veteran. It’s 2003: George W Bush smiles down from classroom walls and Joel’s truck sports an Operation Desert Storm bumper sticker. “Jakarta?,” Joel wonders, as rumours of a horrific infection reach American airwaves. “Where is that? Middle East?” He’ll know soon enough: the Indonesian city is the epicentre of the outbreak. A mutated version of the cordyceps fungus rages out of a bread factory, and the world falls to pieces. Within days, all that’s left is the ragtag society of survivors and an earth governed largely by mushroom-brained zombies.
