Can Prestige TV Be a Video Game?

HBO turned The Last of Us into unmissable television. So why does it feel like something's missing?

- ANDREA LONG CHU

IN THE THIRD EPISODE of HBO's The Last of Us, a pair of postapocalyptic travelers search through an abandoned gas station ten miles outside Boston. "No way!" exclaims Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the savvy teenage girl whom gruff smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) is tasked with transporting across the country. Most of the population has been infected by a parasitic fungus that transforms its victims into killing machines. But in this brief moment of repose, Ellie spots a relic of a more civilized era. "I had a friend who knew everything about this game," she tells Joel breathlessly, mashing the buttons of a busted arcade unit for Midway Games' 1993 fighting game Mortal Kombat II. "There's this one character named Mileena who takes off her mask and she has monster teeth and then she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones!" It's a slyly self-referential moment for The Last of Us, which co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have lovingly adapted from developer Naughty Dog's critically acclaimed 2013 video game. In the game, Joel is a hard-bitten survivor whose daughter was shot on Outbreak Day; Ellie's mysterious immunity to the fungus may hold the key to a vaccine. As they make their way west, through bombed-out city blocks and overgrown interstates, past echolocating zombies and desperate human beings like themselves, they begin to regard each other as father and daughter. Widely considered a masterpiece of the video-game form, The Last of Us boasted a story whose strong characters and disturbing moral conflicts had all the makings of a buzzy television drama so much so that The New Yorker asked in its preview of the series, "Can a Video Game Be Prestige TV?"