Two key writers of HBO’s series The Last of Us are moving on, according to announcements on Instagram yesterday. Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the franchise, and Halley Gross, co-writer of The Last of Us Part 2 and frequent writer on the show, are both leaving before work begins on season 3.
Both were credited as executive producers on the show; Druckmann frequently contributed writing to episodes, as did Gross, and Druckmann also directed. Druckmann and Gross co-wrote the second game, The Last of Us Part 2.
HBO’s hit adaptation of The Last of Us has finally reached the end of its second season, meaning that fans of the show will likely try to fill the void as they wait for season 3. Some may be looking to watch other top-tier adaptations of their favorite video games, which might be a challenge. For many years before The Last of Us, the film and television industries have struggled to develop high-quality adaptations of beloved video games.
However, in recent years, there has been a growing number of film and TV adaptations like The Last of Us that respect and even build upon the source material. While the world holds its breath for The Last of Us season 3, here’s a guide to five must-see movies and TV shows based on video games.
While Cyberpunk 2077 garnered controversy upon its release, one of the most notable outcomes was the creation of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The animated series follows David, a gifted teenager from Night City who resorts to a life of crime with the aid of cybernetic implants to make ends meet after his mother’s death.
Though David and his friends dream of making it big and escaping from their bleak lives in Night City, this thrilling sci-fi series depicts the harsh and timely realities of their world that they struggle to break free from, including violent gangs, sinister corporations, and addictive technology.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is far more kid-friendly than The Last of Us (which should be refreshing to some viewers). However, the third movie is much darker than the previous Sonic films thanks to Shadow the Hedgehog, a character exceptionally voiced by Keanu Reeves. Much like Ellie, Shadow’s life is marked by loss, grief, and a desire for revenge, and his conflict with Sonic brings out the darkness in the Blue Blur himself.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 leaves plenty of room for lighthearted humor in its tale of revenge, especially with Jim Carrey playing two Doctor Robotniks. It also features some spectacular anime-style action carried out by its superpowered hedgehogs, making it the most faithful and thrilling Sonic film yet.
Long before The Last of Us hit HBO, Netflix showed how video game adaptations could be taken seriously with Castlevania. This animated hit depicts the hellish war between humans and vampires unleashed by Dracula (Graham McTavish) after his human wife is burned at the stake. Similar to The Last of Us, Castlevania portrays characters searching for meaning and happiness in a bleak world while battling monsters, both human and undead.
Such a dark and bold series delves into heavy issues of religious oppression, grief, and depression, all while delivering some of the most compelling characters ever seen in a video game adaptation. On top of that, the action is thrilling, the animation is breathtaking, and the voice acting is music to the ears.
Based on League of Legends, Arcaneis a mature animated series centered around sisters Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell), who ultimately turn on each other while caught up in the violent war between two cities.
Both Arcane and The Last of Us explore the cycle of violence that unfolds in a world seemingly determined to destroy itself, while also telling a story about finding love in the unlikeliest of places. Also, with incredible voice acting and animation on par with the Spider-Verse films, Arcane delivered a dazzling and immersive video game adaptation in a league of its own.
Prime Video’s Fallout follows Lucy (Ella Purnell), who, after living in an underground bunker her whole life, ventures out into the radioactive wasteland to rescue her father from raiders. Like The Last of Us, this vast and dense series takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of America filled with monsters, albeit one created by a nuclear war. The show’s characters face several horrors and dark truths about the world they once knew and the people they love.
However, Fallout takes a more comedic approach to its dark, sprawling story. As the naive Lucy and her allies face a world plagued by vicious marauders, horrific “ghouls,” and evil corporations, the upbeat fantasy fed to her and the other Vault dwellers burns away in a haunting satire of American society at the height of the Atomic Age. This all makes for a bold, thrilling, but enjoyable dystopian drama that does justice to its acclaimed source material.
Season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us wrapped up on Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) are back to talk about the finale like they’ve talked about every other episode this season. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: Coming back from last week’s Joel flashback, it took me a second to remember what was actually going on in “The Present” of The Last of Us as we enter the season 2 finale. Ellie marvels at how easy it was to torture a hated enemy even though the result was just two words indicating Abby’s supposed location: “whale” and “wheel.”
I don’t think Ellie’s turn to “the dark side” is unearned, exactly. But I do think that this single-minded, revenge-obsessed version of Ellie is a lot less interesting than the character we grew to love in season 1. We went into this season in a sort of adolescent family drama, and we are leaving it in post-apocalyptic Breaking Bad.
Andrew: To compare it to Breaking Bad implies some kind of gradual, nuanced transformation has taken place, where my problem with the season so far has been mostly the opposite thing. Everyone’s motivations here make sense and are consistent, to some extent, with who we know these characters to be. Ellie is rash and impulsive; Dina is lovestruck; Jesse is loyal and selfless.
It’s just that trading the first season’s story (an unlikely pairing navigates the breadth of a post-apocalyptic America, driven by the promise of a cure) for the second season’s story (Ellie’s revenge fantasy) is a huge downgrade! And I say this as someone who has been slightly warmer on the season overall than you have. They killed the most interesting character and, with him, the story’s most interesting dynamic. Whatever followed that was probably always going to be a letdown, and I’m sure you can attest to that as a game-player who has already experienced a version of all of this.
The show has spun its wheels a bit in Seattle, even with just seven episodes to fill.
Credit:
HBO
Kyle: Yes, I soured on the second game for pretty much the same reasons. But I also feel the show has been more artlessly blunt with some of its character moments. Like the way Jesse finds out about Dina’s pregnancy, and then similarly declares that he “can’t die” because he’s going to be a father. It felt like an AI trained on the TV Tropes website was writing some of these scenes…
Andrew: Listen, normally I’m all for blaming AI, but to blame AI for this one is to imply that lowest-common-denominator TV storytelling hasn’t existed for as long as the medium has. Everyone is just performing the most-predictable version of their respective character archetypes. It’s an expensive show with a talented cast and an interesting riff on the zombie apocalypse idea, so at a baseline it remains watchable. But I suppose that’s damning with faint praise.
Kyle: Yeah I didn’t mean a literal AI. I meant that as a sick burn on the human writers.
Andrew: I am trying to think of things to say to stop this from just being a litany of complaints, but unfortunately complaints are a lot of what I’ve got about this episode. I liked the visuals of Ellie’s nighttime sojourn to the abandoned Ferris wheel. I feel like there is a slightly more interesting TV show happening off to the side of this one, about the conflict between the militarized WLF types and the cultists. But as far as Ellie has been concerned so far, these factions mostly exist to chase the other faction off at the last minute, saving Ellie’s bacon again.
Kyle: And to set up contrived philosophical discussions. Like when Jesse makes the perfectly reasonable decision not to mount a doomed attempt to save a cultist when they’re outnumbered by WLF members. Then, later, Ellie twists that into Jesse chickening out because the guy “wasn’t a member of your community.” No… I’m pretty sure the 6-to-2 odds had at least as much to do with it. But Ellie needs to turn the conversation back to how Joel represents “my community… beaten to death.” It’s not subtle…
Ellie’s single-minded quest for revenge this season has been less compelling than the first season’s unlikely buddy story.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: Yeah I found that moment frustrating because Ellie is here in direct contravention of what her community decided! And it is her community, as a group of people who have looked out for her and provided for her for years, whether she wants to admit that or not. She only uses this idea of “community” with Joel selectively, as a cudgel, so she can do what she already wants to do.
By letting her have the last word on it, the show tacitly endorses her read of the situation, and it’s a variety of vigilante justice that TV audiences have been primed to sympathize with, but man it just falls flat for me.
Kyle: I was also perplexed by Ellie’s brief shipwreck storyline, which led to her being put in a noose by angry cultists. Then she gets saved just seconds from death by a deus ex machina problem in “The Village” that requires the cultists to immediately put her execution on hold and run away. And after all that she just… hops in a boat and goes off to the next completely unrelated bit of the story.
I suppose they’re probably setting things up to provide more context for that scene in the next season, but in the context of this episode as it stands it was just a baffling way to use up 10 minutes or so.
Andrew: Yes I am assuming all the time spent setting up these cultists is going to pay off somehow, eventually, but it hasn’t happened yet.
The episode’s other Big Emotional Moment comes when Ellie catches up with a couple of members of Abby’s crew (I imagine a Hells Angels-style leather jacket, emblazoned with ABBY’S CREW on the back) and ends up killing them both, including a heavily pregnant woman whose dying breaths are spent trying to talk Ellie into cutting her baby out of her. There’s some kind of lesson here, about the ultimate futility of revenge, about the sins of the parents, about what perpetuating the cycle of violence ultimately gets you. We’ll see if Ellie ends up absorbing any of this in the end.
In both her response to the underground torture scene and here, Ellie seems continually shocked that her quest for vengeance might involve any kind of collateral damage to anyone other than Abby.
Kyle: Yes, this bit is culled from the game, but there she just discovers the unborn baby after both of Abby’s companions are already dead. The whole “cut my baby out of me before I die” thing was seemingly crafted to make this just that much more emotionally scarring for Ellie. But as you said, she doesn’t really get to spend any time absorbing any of that, because we’re moving right on to the next plot point.
I understand how and why we don’t get to have 23 episode seasons of TV shows anymore, but it feels like some of the 17 side stories they introduce in this episode (and many more throughout this season) could have stood to have some more time to breathe.
Andrew: I was astounded—astounded! That this was our season finale, because it feels like such a transitional piece-moving episode, and because we’re only seven episodes in. I get that we are stretching one game into two seasons here, but the nine-episode first season was already short, and then this one’s even shorter. Can we just agree to return to 13-episode seasons, please?
Anyway, if your main complaint about the Seattle section of the show has been “too much wheel spinning,” this episode’s big, dramatic cliffhanger is bad news for you. Every day Ellie has spent in Seattle has gotten some big Majora’s Mask-esque “DAY ONE, DAY TWO, etc” subtitle, and now we know why. The beginning of next season is going to show us the events of these three days—but from Abby’s perspective!
I guess I caused this by saying “what if Abby were a more fully formed antagonist” to my monkey’s paw at the start of the season. But I can’t say that this has me on the edge of my seat about season 3, this little slip of a teaser at the end of an episode that I didn’t know was the season finale until after the fact.
Abby oversees her empire.
Credit:
HBO
Kyle: Yes, this structure also apes the second game, which switches to Abby’s backstory halfway through (though there’s no “season break” in the middle there). The dramatic reveal of Abby’s community being housed in a football stadium is one of the most memorable moments of the game and was a rare highlight of this episode, I felt.
Before that, though, we get the inevitable and deadly confrontation between Ellie/Jesse/Tommy and Abby. After seeing it in the show, I had to go back and rewatch how it plays out in the game because something just felt off in the translation. Sure enough, the TV show production added Ellie screaming “no no no” and the sound of a gunshot before that dramatic cut to black and transition to Abby’s earlier POV.
As usual, it feels like the show has a need to just crank up the drama at every turn in an effort to make sure people tune in next week (or next season).
Andrew: Let’s return to that divide between me as a show-watcher and you as a game-player as we wrap up.
I find myself with more gripes than praise here at the end of the season. There are still a lot of things I like here—like I said, the fictional universe is compelling enough to keep it watchable, and for all my complaints about Ellie the character, Bella Ramsey as a performer is doing the best work they can with sort of underwhelming material (predictably, some corners of the Internet have decided to harangue Ramsey relentlessly, partly because they’re a non-binary person who has decided to exist in public).
But my impression is that my biggest problems with this season, from the killing of Joel to the single-minded vengeance arc, are all downstream of story decisions made years ago during the development of The Last of Us Part 2. Normally the complaint with an adaptation is that the show or film’s creators are ruining the story somehow by being insufficiently faithful to the source material and losing something in the process. But it feels like the show’s problems are mostly inherited from the game—in other words, that the show is being too faithful to underwhelming source material. Is this a fair assessment, or am I missing something?
Kyle: I’d say that the structural problems of the show are mostly derived from the game’s decision to transition from “buddy adventure” to “revenge saga” as we’ve discussed ad nauseam. But a lot of the nitty-gritty problems of this season—stuff like pacing, flow, character development, etc.—actually come off a little worse because of decisions to add or change things for the show.
After season 1, I was hopeful that some light-touch changes could help redeem a game that I did not enjoy much. Instead, I think they somehow made it worse.
Andrew: Oops!
Well, there’s always next season. Maybe all of our complaints will be substantively addressed and then some. The only thing we can say for sure is: We haven’t seen the last of The Last of Us.
Kyle: In the end, the real Last of Us was all the people we killed along the way.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Andrew: We’re five episodes into this season of The Last of Us, and most of the infected we’ve seen have still been of the “mindless, screeching horde” variety. But in the first episode of the season, we saw Ellie encounter a single “smart” infected person, a creature that retained some sense of strategy and a self-preservation instinct. It implied that the show’s monsters were not done evolving and that the seemingly stable fragments of civilization that had managed to take root were founded on a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about what these monsters were and what they could do.
Amidst all the human-created drama, the changing nature of the Mushroom Zombie Apocalypse is the backdrop of this week’s entire episode, starting and ending with the revelation that a 2003-vintage cordyceps nest has become a hotbed of airborne spores, ready to infect humans with no biting required.
This is news to me, as a Non-Game Player! But Kyle, I’m assuming this is another shoe that you knew the series was going to drop.
Kyle: Actually, no. I suppose it’s possible I’m forgetting something, but I think the “some infected are actually pretty smart now” storyline is completely new to the show. It’s just one of myriad ways the show has diverged enough from the games at this point that I legitimately don’t know where it’s going to go or how it’s going to get there at any given moment, which is equal parts fun and frustrating.
I will say that the “smart zombies” made for my first real “How are Ellie and Dina going to get out of this one?” moment, as Dina’s improvised cage was being actively torn apart by a smart and strong infected. But then, lo and behold, here came Deus Ex Jesse to save things with a timely re-entrance into the storyline proper. You had to know we hadn’t seen the last of him, right?
Ellie is good at plenty of things, but not so good at lying low.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: As with last week’s subway chase, I’m coming to expect that any time Ellie and Dina seem to be truly cornered, some other entity is going to swoop down and “save” them at the last minute. This week it was an actual ally instead of another enemy that just happened to take out the people chasing Ellie and Dina. But it’s the same basic narrative fake-out.
I assume their luck will run out at some point, but I also suspect that if it comes, that point will be a bit closer to the season finale.
Kyle: Without spoiling anything from the games, I will say you can expect both Ellie and Dina to experience their fair share of lucky and unlucky moments in the episodes to come.
Speaking of unlucky moments, while our favorite duo is hiding in the park we get to see how the local cultists treat captured WLF members, and it is extremely not pretty. I’m repeating myself a bit from last week, but the lingering on these moments of torture feels somehow more gratuitous in an HBO show, even when compared to similarly gory scenes in the games.
Andrew: Well we had just heard these cultists compared to “Amish people” not long before, and we already know they don’t have tanks or machine guns or any of the other Standard Issue The Last of Us Paramilitary Goon gear that most other people have, so I guess you’ve got to do something to make sure the audience can actually take the cultists seriously as a threat. But yeah, if you’re squeamish about blood-and-guts stuff, this one’s hard to watch.
I do find myself becoming more of a fan of Dina and Ellie’s relationship, or at least of Dina as a character. Sure, her tragic backstory’s a bit trite (she defuses this criticism by pointing out in advance that it is trite), but she’s smart, she can handle herself, she is a good counterweight to Ellie’s rush-in-shooting impulses. They are still, as Dina points out, doing something stupid and reckless. But I am at least rooting for them to make it out alive!
Kyle: Personality wise the Dina/Ellie pairing has just as many charms as the Joel/Ellie pairing from last season. But while I always felt like Joel and Ellie had a clear motivation and end goal driving them forward, the thirst for revenge pushing Dina and Ellie deeper into Seattle starts to feel less and less relevant the more time goes on.
The show seems to realize this, too, stopping multiple times since Joel’s death to kind of interrogate whether tracking down these killers is worth it when the alternative is just going back to Jackson and prepping for a coming baby. It’s like the writers are trying to convince themselves even as they’re trying (and somewhat failing, in my opinion) to convince the audience of their just and worthy cause.
Andrew: Yeah, I did notice the points where Our Heroes paused to ask “are we sure we want to be doing this?” And obviously, they are going to keep doing this, because we have spent all this time setting up all these different warring factions and we’re going to use them, dang it!! But this has never been a thing that was going to bring Joel back, and it only seems like it can end in misery, especially because I assume Jesse’s plot armor is not as thick as Ellie or Dina’s.
Kyle: Personally I think the “Ellie and Dina give up on revenge and prepare to start a post-apocalyptic family (while holding off zombies)” would have been a brave and interesting direction for a TV show. It would have been even braver for the game, although very difficult for a franchise where the main verbs are “shoot” and “stab.”
Andrew: Yeah if The Last of Us Part II had been a city-building simulator where you swap back and forth between managing the economy of a large town and building defenses to keep out the hordes, fans of the first game might have been put off. But as an Adventure of Link fan I say: bring on the sequels with few-if-any gameplay similarities to their predecessors!
The cordyceps threat keeps evolving.
Credit:
HBO
Kyle: “We killed Joel” team member Nora definitely would have preferred if Ellie and Dina were playing that more domestic kind of game. As it stands, Ellie ends up pursuing her toward a miserable-looking death in a cordyceps-infested basement.
The chase scene leading up to this mirrors a very similar one in the game in a lot of ways. But while I found it easy to suspend my disbelief for the (very scripted) chase on the PlayStation, watching it in a TV show made me throw up my hands and say “come on, these heavily armed soldiers can’t stop a little girl that’s making this much ruckus?”
Andrew: Yeah Jesse can pop half a dozen “smart” zombies in half a dozen shots, but when it’s a girl with a giant backpack running down an open hallway everyone suddenly has Star Wars Stormtrooper aim. The visuals of the cordyceps den, with the fungified guys breathing out giant clouds of toxic spores, is effective in its unsettling-ness, at least!
This episode’s other revelation is that what Joel did to the Fireflies in the hospital at the end of last season is apparently not news to Ellie, when she hears it from Nora in the episode’s final moments. It could be that Ellie, Noted Liar, is lying about knowing this. But Ellie is also totally incapable of controlling her emotions, and I’ve got to think that if she had been surprised by this, we would have been able to tell.
Kyle: Yeah, saying too much about what Ellie knows and when would be risking some major spoilers. For now I’ll just say the way the show decided to mix things up by putting this detailed information in Nora’s desperate, spore-infested mouth kind of landed with a wet thud for me.
I was equally perplexed by the sudden jump cut from “Ellie torturing a prisoner” to “peaceful young Ellie flashback” at the end of the episode. Is the audience supposed to assume that this is what is going on inside Ellie’s head or something? Or is the narrative just shifting without a clutch?
Andrew: I took it to mean that we were about to get a timeline-breaking departure episode next week, one where we spend some time in flashback mode filling in what Ellie knows and why before we continue on with Abby Quest. But I guess we’ll see, won’t we!
Kyle: Oh, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for a bevy of flashbacks I knew were coming in some form or another. But the particular way they shifted to the flashback here, with mere seconds left in this particular brutal episode, was baffling to me.
Andrew: I think you do it that way to get people hyped about the possibility of seeing Joel again next week. Unless it’s just a cruel tease! But it’s probably not, right? Unless it is!
Kyle: Now I kind of hope the next episode just goes back to Ellie and Dina and doesn’t address the five seconds of flashback at all. Screw you, audience!
Inspiration can be found in unexpected places. Director Kate Herron managed to use a tip she learned in The Last of Usand apply it to the live-action adaptation of The Sims.
Herron is a co-writer on the script for The Sims, a movie she will also direct. Herron, who directed the latest episode of The Last of Us, revealed how a component of the HBO show’s script inspired her to apply it to The Sims.
It’s tricky to know what I can say, but I’m very indebted to Craig [Mazin] and Neil [Neil Druckmann] for giving me an opportunity to direct on it” Herron told Variety about directing The Last of Us season 2, episode 4. “Getting to do that was like a bucket list kind of moment. I just hope I get better at my job. OK, actually, I’ve got a much better answer for you. I’ll answer it again. Craig writes the thoughts of the characters in the script. I love it, and I have 100% stolen that, and I’m now doing it in all the scripts I write. It’s such a good idea.”
The Sims‘ live-action movie was announced in March 2024. Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap banner will produce The Sims alongside Amazon MGM Studios and Electronic Arts. Herron will direct from a screenplay she’s writing with Briony Redman.
Liane Hentscher / HBO
In Herron’s episode of The Last of Us titled Day One, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) spend their first day in Seattle exploring the confines of the city. At night, Ellie and Dina discover a group of WLF soldiers murdered at the hands of the Seraphites. When the duo tries to escape from the WLF, they run into the infected.
While trying to escape, Ellie is bitten after successfully saving Dina. When Dina points a gun in her face, Ellie reveals her immunity. Dina later confesses her pregnancy to Ellie, and the two have sex while hiding in an abandoned theater.
The episode ends with Ellie and Dina overlooking the city as they plan to infiltrate a hospital with WLF soldiers, which could lead them to Abby.
The Last of Us season 2, episode 5 airs on May 11.
There have been fantastic new shows in 2025, like Paradise on Hulu, Your Friends & Neighbors on Apple TV+, and Apple Cider Vinegar and The Residence on Netflix. Popular shows — including The Handmaid’s Tale, Hacks, and Yellowjackets — returned with new seasons.
It has been a competitive year so far in television. The best TV shows of the last several months include a mix of newly launched series and anticipated returning ones that delivered beyond expectations. If you’re looking for something to add to your watchlist, start bookmarking these, the seven best TV shows of 2025 so far, in no particular order.
One of the most anticipated returning shows this year, The Last of Us debuted its first season in January 2023, and fans waited more than two years for season two. When it finally arrived, boy, did it deliver. The story picks up five years later with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) residing in Tommy’s (Gabriel Luna) community in Jackson. Kaitlyn Dever, Catherine O’Hara, and Jeffrey Wright play a new cast of characters. This season includes more violently infected people and scenes eerily faithful to the game.
Based on the game The Last of Us Part II, The Last of Us season two had fans at the edges of their seats waiting to discover if that scene would happen and change the trajectory of the show going forward. (Spoiler alert: it did). Despite reservations about how different the show will be, the post-apocalyptic drama remains one of the best in its genre. What’s so great about The Last of Us is that you’ll still be glued to the screen even if you have never played the game. In fact, you might have an even better experience since scenes will shock you when you don’t know they’re coming.
Returning for its seventh season, Black Mirror is back to the “OG Black Mirror,” as creator Charlie Brooker described, tackling heart-wrenching, disturbing, thought-provoking stories about the worst-case future scenarios if technology is taken too far. There isn’t a bad episode in the bunch, with six compartmentalized stories, each with its own unique theme, story, look, and feel.
Striking the most conversation are episode one, Common People; episode three, Hotel Reverie; and episode six, Eulogy, arguably the strongest of the bunch. There’s also Plaything, which brings back characters from the interactive movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, and the first-ever sequel episode in USS Callister: Into Infinity. Black Mirror isn’t a bingeable show: you’ll want to give yourself time to mentally digest every episode by the end. But each one is brilliantly written, beautifully shot, and cleverly told. Keen-eyed fans will notice tons of Easter eggs that call back to earlier episodes in this new batch.
Seth Rogen hit it out of the park with this satirical comedy that skewers the very business he works in. In The Studio, he plays Matt Remick, a long-time studio executive who finally gets promoted to studio head. Matt quickly realizes that the job requires balancing many balls in the air while managing conflicting personalities. This is especially tough for Matt, who is desperate to be liked by his staff, directors, and actors. Matt thinks he is well-liked, blissfully unaware that people are only nice because they either want something from him or have to be because he holds the purse strings.
Rogen is joined by a fantastic supporting cast that includes Ike Barinholtz as his friend and now underling Sal, Kathryn Hahn as Maya, the sharp-tongued head of marketing, and Catherine O’Hara as Patty, former studio head and Matt’s mentor. The Studio pokes fun at every Hollywood stereotype, from the entitled actors and the eccentric directors to the unruly studios and budget cutbacks. Most notably, the central theme is the studio’s focus on cheesy money-making blockbusters instead of cinematic masterpieces like Matt so desperately wants to make. The movie business has changed, and The Studio is a scathing yet hilarious commentary on that.
This isn’t your grandma’s medical drama. The Pitt is raw, emotional, and realistic, lauded by real-life doctors for the accurate way it captures the emergency room of a busy training hospital and the dynamics between doctors and residents, nurses, and patients. Noah Wyle, who portrayed Dr. John Carter through the entire run of ER, puts on scrubs (rather, a hoodie) again as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending doctor still wracked with guilt over the death of his mentor during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each episode, which garnered 10 million viewers for its first season, represents one hour of the 15-hour shift. The snail’s pace timeline doesn’t result in a slow-moving story: every minute in an emergency room is tense, with little time for the doctors and nurses to eat, much less even take bathroom breaks.
Creator R. Scott Gemmill, who worked on ER, developed The Pitt, which is racier than your typical network medical drama with profane language and scenes that will make you wince beyond the usual close-up surgery shots. Rife with medical dialogue, you’ll feel exhausted for the characters after every episode. You’ll also be curious to move to the next episode to see more patients and learn who will finally make it out of that jam-packed waiting room. While The Pitt touches on the personal lives of its characters, those stories come secondary to medicine, a refreshing departure from the usual soapy medical dramas.
There are no flashy special effects, no crazy action scenes, and no long, drawn-out storyline with cliffhanger endings. Every episode of Adolescence is filmed in a single take with no fancy transitions or camera cuts. It’s as raw as it gets, a window into the harrowing story that will send chills down your spine because of how real it feels. The British crime drama begins when police charge into a family’s home, looking for 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper delivering a brilliant performance). Jamie is accused of murder, leaving his parents completely confused.
The stand-out episode is Jamie’s sit-down with forensic child psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), who uncovers the deep-seated misogyny that incel culture, bullying, and online hate have fostered in not just this young man, but so many others. The other episodes, meanwhile, follow Jamie’s parents, Eddie (Stephen Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), as they grapple with the new reality without their son and question what they might have done wrong or failed to do right. Adolescence, which ranks among Netflix’s most popular English-language series, is a wake-up call for anyone with teens and an eye-opening series about the dangers and influence of social media.
Every season, Mike White’s The White Lotus takes you to a different exotic locale. First, it was Hawaii, then Sicily, and now, with season three, Thailand. As with the previous two seasons, season three features an entirely new cast with the exception of two returning characters who become central to one of the interweaving plots. A murder kicks off the season. Then, the show retells the events that led up to that murder. You’ll have fun trying to guess the murderer and the victim. Given the eclectic mix of wealthy guests (and staff) carrying more baggage than just their luggage, it could be anyone.
This season of The White Lotus goes in so many strange directions, with plenty of sex, fantasies, and situations that go way too far. But the essence of the show remains. Plus, season 3 is a breathtaking window into the beauty of Thailand. While The White Lotus will return for season 4, the location remains a mystery. White, however, has dropped some hints where it might be filmed.
If there’s one show just about everyone was talking about this year so far, it’s Severance. After an almost three-year wait, the series returned to continue the story after that explosive season one finale when Mark (Adam Scott) learned that his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) was actually alive. The second season dives deeper into other characters and follows Mark’s journey as an innie and outie. Every episode has something to analyze, pick apart, and theorize. The show is so wonderfully shot as well; it’s arguably one of the most visually beautiful shows on television.
The second season ended with yet another massive cliffhanger that leaves fans excited for season 3. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait as long for season three.
This latest episode of The Last of Us season 2 showcased life without Joel (Pedro Pascal). After Joel’s stunning death in the second episode, last night was all about grief and how the people of Jackson will move on after this tragedy. Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey, takes Joel’s death particularly hard, leading to an emotional moment involving a piece of clothing.
After being released from the hospital, Ellie returns home to an empty house. Ellie walks into Joel’s room and begins looking through his things. Once she finds Joel’s jacket, Ellie breaks down into tears. Ramsey revealed to The Hollywood Reporter why this emotional moment was the “toughest” scene to film.
“Oh God, in the closet, that was the hardest [scene],” Ramsey said. “So I really struggle with crying in scenes. I can get a tear out, but that’s different to crying. And even getting the tear, it doesn’t come easy for me. I don’t cry in front of people in my everyday life. A very, very limited amount of people in my life will see me cry. And so having to do that on a set full of people with the monitor and then more people watching the monitors…it’s virtually impossible for me. So I was really worried about that scene, and that was the toughest one for me to shoot.”
Liane Hentscher / HBO
Instead of channeling sad thoughts, Ramsey thought of the “happiest of memories” with Pascal to elicit an emotional response.
“The thing that is always the saddest for me is remembering the happy things,” Ramsey explained. “I was remembering us the first few times that we met and the whole of shooting season one together, and the funniest moments. I was remembering all of that and through the lens of losing him — not just Joel and Ellie, but like me and Pedro — because the memories of me and Pedro and Joel and Ellie are so intertwined for me.”
In the episode, Ellie proposes sending a group of townspeople to Seattle to find Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), but the town council denies her request. Ellie and Dina go to Seattle anyway. While on the trail, they encounter a group of dead Seraphites, who Ellie and Dina think could have been killed by Abby and the WLF. The episode ends with Ellie and Dina reaching Seattle, while members of the WLF march through the streets.
The next episode of The Last of Us season 2 airs on Sunday, May 4.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Andrew: And there we are! Our first post-Joel episode of The Last Of Us. It’s not like we’ve never had Joel-light episodes before, but Pedro Pascal’s whole “reluctant uncle” thing is a load-bearing element of several currently airing TV shows and I find myself missing it a LOT.
Kyle: Yeah, I’ve said here in the past how the core Ellie/Joel relationship was key to my enjoyment of the first game. Its absence gently soured me on the second game and is starting to do the same for the second season.
But I was also literally mouth agape during the hospital scene, when Ellie said she had an opportunity to talk to Joel on the porch before he died but passed on it. Anyone who’s played the game knows how central “the porch scene” is to recontextualizing the relationship between these two characters before they are parted forever. I was hoping that we’d still get that scene in a surprise flashback later in the series, but now that seems unlikely at best.
Andrew: (I am not watching that video by the way, I need my brain to stay pure!!)
Kyle: I suppose Ellie could have just been lying to a nosy therapist, but if she wasn’t, and their final conversation has just been retconned out of existence… I don’t know what they were thinking. Then again, if it’s just a head fake to psych out game players, well, bravo, I guess.
Tommy is torn between love for his brother and the welfare of the community he’s helped to build.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: Ellie is a known liar, which we know even before Catherine O’Hara, world’s least ethical therapist, declares her to be a lying liar who lies. If the scene is as pivotal as you say, then I’m sure we’ll get it at a time that’s engineered to maximize the gut punch. The re-strung guitar ended up back in her room in the end, didn’t it?
We’re able to skip ahead to Ellie being semi-functional again because of a three-month time jump, showing us a Jackson community that is rebuilding after a period of mourning and cleaning that it didn’t want viewers to spend time on. I am struck by the fact that, despite everything, Jackson gets to be the one “normal” community with baseball and sandwiches and boring town-hall meetings, where every other group of more than 10 people is either a body-mutilation cult or a paramilitary band of psychopaths.
Kyle: We also saw the version of Boston that Ellie grew up in last season, which was kind of halfway between “paramilitary psychopaths” and “normal community.” But I do think the Last of Us fiction in general has a pretty grim view of how humans would react to precarity, which makes Jackson’s uniqueness all the more important as a setting.
We also get our first glimpse into Jackson politics in this episode, which ends up going in quite a different direction to get to the same “Ellie and Dina go out for revenge.” While I appreciate the town hall meeting as a decent narrative explanation of why two young girls are making this revenge trek alone, I feel like the whole sequence was a little too drawn out with sanctimonious philosophizing from all sides.
Even after an apocalypse, city council meetings are a constant.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: Yeah the town hall scene was an odd one. Parts of it could have been lifted from Parks & Recreation, particularly the bit where the one guy comes to the “Are We Voting To Pursue Bloody Vengeance” meeting to talk about the finer points of agriculture (he does not have a strong feeling about the bloody vengeance).
Part of it almost felt too much like “our” politics, when Seth (the guy who harassed Ellie and Dina at the dance months ago, but attempted a partially forced apology afterward) stands up and calls everyone snowflakes for even thinking about skipping out on the bloody vengeance (not literally, but that’s the clear subtext). He even invokes a shadowy, non-specific “they” who would be “laughing at us” if the community doesn’t track down and execute Abby. I’ll tell you what, that he is one of two people backing Ellie’s attempted vengeance tour doesn’t make me feel better about what she’s deciding to do here.
Kyle: I will say the line “Nobody votes for angry” rang a bit hollow given our current political moment. Even if their national politics calcified in 2003, I think that doesn’t really work…
Andrew: SO MANY people vote for angry! Or, at least, for emotional. It’s an extremely reliable indicator!
Kyle: Except in Jackson, the last bastion of unemotional, mercy-forward community on either side of the apocalypse!
Andrew: So rather than trying the angry route, Ellie reads a prepared statement where she (again lying, by the way!) claims that her vengeance tour isn’t about vengeance at all and attempts to appeal to the council’s better angels, citing the bonds of community that hold them all together. When this (predictably) fails, Ellie (even more predictably) abandons the community at almost the first possible opportunity, setting out on a single horse with Dina in tow to exact vengeance alone.
Kyle: One thing I did appreciate in this episode is how many times they highlighted that Ellie was ready to just “GO GO GO REVENGE NOW NO WAITING” and even the people that agreed with her were like “Hold up, you at least need to stock up on some better supplies, girl!”
Andrew: Maybe you can sense it leaking through, and it’s not intentional, but I am already finding Ellie’s impulsive snark a bit less endearing without Joel’s taciturn competence there to leaven it.
Kyle: I can, and I can empathize with it. I think Tommy is right, too, in saying that Joel would have moved heaven and earth to save a loved one but not necessarily to get revenge for one that’s already dead. He was pragmatic enough to know when discretion was the better part of valor, and protecting him and his was always the priority. And I’m not sure the town hall “deterrence” arguments would have swayed him.
Look on the bright side, though, at least we get a lost of long, languorous scenes of lush scenery on the ride to Seattle (a scene-setting trait the show borrows well from the movie). I wonder what you made of Dina asking Ellie for a critical assessment of her kissing abilities, especially the extremely doth-protest-too-much “You’re gay, I’m not” bit…
Ellie and Dina conspire.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: “You’re gay, I’m not, and those are the only two options! No, I will not be answering any follow-up questions!”
I am not inclined to get too on Dina’s case about that, though. Sexuality is complicated, as is changing or challenging your own perception of yourself. The show doesn’t go into it, but I’ve also got to imagine that in any post-apocalyptic scenario, the vital work of Propagating the Species creates even more societal pressure to participate in heteronormative relationships than already exists in our world.
Ellie, who is only truly happy when she is pissing someone off, is probably more comfortable being “out” in this context than Dina would be.
Kyle: As the episode ends we get a bit of set up for a couple of oncoming threats (or is it just one?): an unseen cult-killing force and a phalanx of heavily armed WLF soldiers that Ellie and Dina seem totally unprepared for. In a video game I’d have no problem believing my super-soldier protagonist character could shoot and kill as many bad guys as the game wants to throw at me. In a more “grounded” TV show, the odds do not seem great.
Andrew: One thread I’m curious to see the show pull at: Ellie attempts to blame “Abby and her crew,” people who left Jackson months ago, for a mass slaying of cult members that had clearly happened just hours ago, an attempt to build Abby up into a monster in her head so it’s easier to kill her when the time comes. We’ll see how well it works!
But yeah, Ellie and Dina and their one horse are not ready for the “Terror Lake Salutes Hannibal Crossing The Alps“-length military parade that the WLF is apparently prepared to throw at them.
Kyle: They’re pretty close to Seattle when they find the dead cultists, so from their perspective I’m not sure blaming Abby and crew for the mass murder is that ridiculous
Andrew: (Girl whose main experience with murder is watching Abby brutally kill her father figure, seeing someone dead on the ground): Getting a lot of Abby vibes from this…
It finally happened. The moment gamers knew would change the show finally occurred on Sunday night’s episode of The Last of Us.
In the episode, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) lures Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Dina (Isabela Merced) to the mansion where her friends have hunkered down. Once inside, the group temporarily puts Dina to sleep, and Abby then reveals herself as the daughter of the doctor Joel killed in Salt Lake City.
To exact her vengeance, Abby shoots Joel in the knee with a shotgun and beats him with a golf club. Ellie eventually storms into the room, but she’s captured before she can save Joel. Despite Ellie’s pleas, Abby stabs Joel with one half of the broken golf club, killing him. The group spares Ellie, who then crawls to Joel’s dead body and lies beside him.
The emotional scene is one of the most heartbreaking moments depicted in the show so far. Filming the scene was not easy for Dever, who lost her mother to metastatic breast cancer in the lead-up to the start of production.
Liane Hentscher / HBO
“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene, and my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day,” Dever told EW. “So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”
Before Abby kills Joel, she delivers a chilling monologue about how her father’s death led her to this moment. According to The Last of Us co-creator Craig Mazin, Abby’s speech conveyed to Joel that “what he did was wrong” and that “we kill for the people we love.” Because this speech is not part of the game, Dever used it to express Abby’s struggles.
“This very human part of her that has been struggling for so long, and she’s trying to find a way out of that struggle,” Dever explained. “But that is what is very similar to all of those characters, even in that room: all of those characters are just flawed human beings in a lot of ways.”
The third episode of The Last of Us season 2 will air at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, April 27. The episode will air on HBO and stream on Max.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: To start us off as we return to the world of The Last of Us, as a non-game player, maybe recap what you remember from the first season and what you’ve heard about the second.
Andrew: Going into the first season, I’d been aware of The Last of Us, the video game, as a story about an older guy and a kid trying to navigate a post-apocalyptic world. And the show was also mostly that: It’s Joel and Ellie against the world, and who knows, maybe this spunky young girl with an apparent immunity to the society-ravaging fungal infection could hold the key to a cure!
Things fell apart at the end of last season when the Fireflies (a group of survivalists/doctors/scientists/etc.) may or may not have been threatening to kill Ellie in order to research their cure, which made Joel go on a murder rampage, which he then lied to Ellie about. We fade to black as they make their way back toward the one semi-functioning human settlement they’d visited on their travels, where Joel’s brother and his family also happen to live.
Going into this season: I know nothing. I don’t really engage in TV show fandoms or keep up with casting announcements or plot speculation. And the only thing I know about the second game going into this is a vague sense that it wasn’t as well-received as the first. In short, I am as a newborn baby, ready to take in the second season of a show I kind of like with the freshest possible eyes.
Kyle: I may be to blame for that vague sense you have. I fell in love with the first game, especially the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and I thought the first season of the show captured that quite well. I thought the endings to both the game and season 1 of the show were just about perfect and that any continuation after that was gonna struggle to justify itself.
Without giving too much away, I think the second game misses a lot of what made the narrative of the first one special and gets sidetracked in a lot of frankly gratuitous directions. That said, this premiere episode of the second season drew me in more than I expected.
One jarring thing (in a good way) about both the second game and the second season is suddenly seeing Joel and Ellie just existing in a thriving community with electric lights, music, alcohol, decent food, laughter, etc., etc. After the near-constant precarity and danger they’ve faced in the recent past, it really throws you for a loop.
Andrew: Unfortunately but predictably, you see both of them struggling to adapt in different ways; these are two extremely individualistic, out-for-number-one people. Ellie (now a 19-year-old, after a five-year time jump) never met a rule she couldn’t break, even when it endangers her friends and other community members.
And while Joel will happily fix your circuit breaker or re-string your guitar, he emphatically rejected a needs-of-the-many-outweigh-the-needs-of-the-few approach at the end of last season. When stuff breaks bad (and I feel confident that it will, that’s the show that it is) these may not be the best people to have in your corner.
My only real Game Question for you at the outset is the big one: Is season 2 adapting The Last of Us Part II or is it doing its own thing or are we somewhere in between or is it too early to say?
“Oh, dang, is that Catherine O’Hara?”
Kyle: From what I have heard it will be adapting the first section of the second game (it’s a long game) and making some changes and digressions that expand on the game’s story (like the well-received Nick Offerman episode last season). Already, I can tell you that Joel’s therapy scene was created for the TV show, and I think it improves on a somewhat similar “Joel pours his heart out” scene from early in the game.
The debut episode is also already showing a willingness to move around scenes from the game to make them fit better in chronological order, which I’m already appreciating.
One thing I think the show is already doing well, too, is showing 19-year-old Ellie “acting like every 19-year-old ever” (as one character puts it) to father figure Joel. Even in a zombie apocalypse, it’s a relatable bit of character-building for anyone who’s been a teenager or raised a teenager.
Andrew: Joel’s therapist, played by the wonderful Catherine O’Hara. (See, that’s why you don’t follow casting announcements, so you can watch a show and be like, “Oh, dang, is that Catherine O’Hara?”)
I didn’t know if it was a direct adaptation, but I did notice that the show’s video gamey storytelling reflexes were still fully intact. We almost instantly end up in a ruined grocery store chock-full of environmental storytelling (Ellie notes a happy birthday banner and 2003’s Employee of the Year wall).
And like in any new game new season of a TV show, we quickly run into a whole new variant of mushroom monster that retains some of its strategic instincts and can take cover rather than blindly rushing at you. Some of the jump scares were so much like quick-time events that I almost grabbed my controller so I could press X and help Ellie out.
