‘The Last Of Us’ Is Finally Coming To HBO In 2023

blame it on Meka September 27, 2022

One of my favorite video games of the last few years or so — and, quite literally, most traumatizing — is finally coming to television.

After years of being stuck in development hell, HBO green-lit a formal adaptation of Naughty Dog’s wildly successful Playstation game The Last Of Us in November 2020. After spending the past few summers developing it, the show is now set to arrive on HBO/HBO Max sometime in 2023.

The series will follow Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler tasked with escorting a teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), across a post-apocalyptic United States, following an outbreak of a mutant fungus that transforms its human hosts into aggressive creatures known as the Infected. Sounds like standard “zombie apocalypse” warfare, but where The Last Of Us (and its 2020 sequel, The Last Of Us Part II) shined was in its narrative, character development, and its emotional depth.

TBH, this was one of the saddest — and at times the most emotionally difficult — games I’ve ever played, and I expect the show to evoke those same feelings. Remember when (and how) Glenn died in The Walking Dead? Things like that happened in the games pretty regularly (Part II starts off rough, though I’m sure that, judging from the trailer, this series won’t get remotely close to that point in the first season), and each game took about 40 hours to complete.

Either way, my body is ready.

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