The Last of Us exploded onto HBO, becoming the second-largest debut since 2010, right underneath House of the Dragon. Fans were ecstatic, and ratings for the show were impossibly high, literally. Even hours before The Last of Us premiered, reviews came flooding into IMDb, making it a near-perfect series before anyone had even seen it. But the release hardly did anything to change the score, as audiences kept the rating up there with the likes of Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. The Last of Us was a loaded gun full of its own popularity, ready to go off the minute it hit the screen.
But that didn’t prevent fans of the video game from being wary of the adaptation. Television audiences have plenty of experiences watching their favorite video games be turned into slop by a TV director that can’t bridge the gap between mediums. Thankfully, the HBO series has involved the creator of The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann, to prevent that from happening. However, Druckmann must now learn to adapt his story for television, and if the first episode of The Last of Us is any indication, he’s still writing for a video game. It’s a beautiful series, true to its source material and entertaining to the last minute, but it’s missing something that most television dramas stand on: structure.
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Storytelling in Context
HBO
Prior to the release of The Last of Us, many fans were worried about how well the game might take to being adapted. Video game adaptations are not always bad, but when they are, they have a tradition of being monumental failures. From Assassin’s Creed (2016) to Doom (2005), games that have had otherwise enthralled players on their couches have been major flops on their televisions. Fans of The Last of Us had expressed some anxiety that one of their favorite games might meet the same fate. The first episode reassured viewers, at the very least giving everyone a sign that things were going “so far so good.” But the game might have been adapted a little too well.
Something was rather curious about the first episode of The Last of Us; it didn’t follow the typical three-act structure of most television dramas. Not every story needs to be told this way, there are many other structures by which screenwriters can align their scripts, but most of the time, an episodic tale like this one is laid out for us in this manner. But the first episode of The Last of Us does a better job of setting us up for the story to come than it does of organizing its own events. Perhaps this would be a good idea in a video game. Indeed, the moment before the characters are about to set off on their epic journey seems like the perfect time to save, quit and walk away for a while. But it’s not the most symmetrical note to leave the audience hanging on when they’re watching a series.
Storytelling in a video game is much longer and has more in common with epic poetry than it does with a movie or television series. That is to say, it has its own structure and pace of storytelling such that we experience a different type of emotional roller coaster when we go on that journey. The Last of Us video game absolutely follows Joel’s hero’s journey to cure the fungal pandemic and save his metaphorical relationship with his daughter, but it does so in a way that, to a screenwriter, it looks like 90% of the story takes place in act two. The player might go through 90 minutes of prologue, written to set up the story and introduce the narrative, then spend 12 hours solving puzzles and sneaking around zombies, not all of which have great narrative significance. One can’t simply put a carbon copy of the game’s events into a television studio, even if it worked really well for the first episode.
The Last of Us Will Have to Be Careful
Neil Druckmann will need to tell his story in a different way if he wants the series to be successful. His game did very well with just a group of story beats arranged in one long, drawn-out line, but this series will have to play differently. Whether he wants it or not, he only has about an hour of screen time each week to communicate the feelings he wants to the audience. And for those feelings to hit home, he’ll have to organize them appropriately. His game was astounding, but some of its story beats will have to be condensed into shorter spaces to make the story work. There will be times when he’ll have to decide between writing a television show and transcribing his video game.
There are games that play well enough like movies, but some parts are always more exciting than others. A 14-hour-long playtime can’t be emotional every minute. But that is what Druckmann will have to do in order to create an effective television series. Every episode he will have to take us up, then down, then up again in order to give us a complete experience in the space of an hour. He can’t just tell the story as if he were writing a nine-hour movie. The Last of Us will have to be filled with a dramatic arc for every episode we see. Otherwise, Druckmann risks losing his title to the bin of bad video game adaptations.
