The Last of Us series is the best adaptation of a video game

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It didn’t take much, it comes to comment. Video game TV adaptations have almost always been a disaster. From Lara Croft to Mortal Kombat, the exceptions are very few, perhaps only the very recent Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is saved. The Last of Us the TV series based on the homonymous video game series has the merit of having broken an invisible wall that had lasted for at least twenty years. The first episode which aired on January 16 on Sky and Now takes you there, inside a fierce and violent apocalypse born in 2013 in a Playstation video game.

The story of The Last Of Us takes place twenty years after the destruction of modern civilization. Joel, a cunning survivor, is tasked with getting Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, out of a heavily guarded quarantine zone. A seemingly easy task that soon turns into a brutal and harrowing journey, as the two will have to cross the United States together and depend on each other for survival.

The series takes you on Joel and Ellie’s journey naturally, without necessarily wanting to be didactic, without chasing the tastes of gamers and without the urgency of wanting to please the genre audience at all costs, that of zombie movie lovers . The performers are good and not discussed: Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian) seems born to impersonate Joel. The rising British star Bella Ramsey who is known in Italy for having played Lyanna Mormont in “Game of Thrones” seems to be a particularly good choice even though she does not look like the actress Ashley Johnso who is Ellie in the video game. However, the credit is not theirs. Nor the video game.

It is true that The Last of Us has been defined by critics as a videogame “Apocalypse Now”, a milestone in the history of this industry in terms of content maturity, technique and plot. But it is not the most original narrative subject in the world. What makes this series perhaps the best videogame transposition ever is the writing. The series is not an enlarged cut-scene, it is not an auteur zombie film or even one of those products that are born to speak to the most ardent fans. It does well what a series should do: tell the context, delve into the psychology of the characters, broaden the viewer’s gaze on aspects that the video game was unable to explore. The credit probably goes to a first and last name: That of the game’s creative director Neil Druckmann and Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin. One comes from the world of video games and one from that of television. Together, finally, they have changed something in the way of producing content.