Don’t expect this 9-hour series to find Joel and Ellie wheeling carts around to hop fences or fighting off Clickers every time they need to get from one place to another-Joel kills exactly one baddie with his giant arms, and it’s not an infected one. While HBO’s The Last of Us is true to the game, those who have played it can look forward to differences, if not surprises. We can almost imagine an HBO-style tagline: “It’s not Detective Pikachu. It’s exactly the sort of premise (serious, with contemporary overtones) and thematic material (both formats take on grief, hope, and parenthood) that you would expect more from cable TV than a Sonic game. The game, whose acclaim rests primarily with its narrative, was written and directed by Neil Druckmann (who, along with Chernobyl 's Craig Mazin, serves as showrunner for the adaptation) and follows a smuggler named Joel (Troy Baker in the game, Pedro Pascal in the show) as he ventures across the country with a teen girl (Ashley Johnson/Bella Ramsey) who might be the key to a cure to a fungal pandemic that has turned the world into an apocalyptic wasteland.
