It's Officially The End Of An Era For The Last Of Us

Published Oct 3, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Sign in to your ScreenRant account When it premiered in 2023, HBO’s The Last of Us broke the video game adaptation curse. Where most video game adaptations deviate wildly from their source material or fail to recapture what made the story and characters so compelling in the first place, The Last of Us season 1 was a pitch-perfect translation of the original Last of Us game. It expanded the world and the characters, but most of the expansions enhanced the drama instead of detracting from it. What set The Last of Us apart from other adaptations is that the games’ original creators were involved in the series. Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin joined forces with Neil Druckmann, who wrote and directed the games, to co-showrun the TV show. Mazin was a long-time fan of the games, and he had his own ideas about how to adapt them for television, but Druckmann was there to make sure he stayed on the right themes and didn’t go too far off-course. But after the polarized response to The Last of Us season 2, Druckmann and his colleagues at Naughty Dog are all bowing out of the series. The official reason is so they can dedicate more time and resources to their next game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, but the fan reception to season 2 has to have been a factor. The Last of Us season 2 was a much less faithful adaptation than season 1, and its changes weakened the story instead of strengthening it. Revealing who Abby was upfront spoiled the best twist from the game, and lowering Ellie’s W.L.F. body count to one diluted her descent into darkness. With Naughty Dog withdrawing from the HBO series, none of the games’ original creators will be involved in the TV show going forward. Druckmann’s co-writer, Halley Gross, has also dropped out ahead of The Last of Us season 3. The Last Of Us Season 3 Is A Huge Risk Without Neil Druckmann Liane Hentscher / ©HBO / Courtesy Everett Collection Making a third season of The Last of Us without Druckmann is a huge risk. Druckmann has been the driving creative force behind The Last of Us saga since the very beginning — no one understands this world or these characters better than him — so it was a good idea to have him around for seasons 1 and 2, getting his input every step of the way. It risks undoing what made The Last of Us work so well in the first place. Initially, what made the show so successful was that the games’ creator was working alongside a diehard fan, so the creator stayed true to the original vision while the fan threw out pitches for extra scenes and characters that long-time fans like himself would want to see. Mazin was the voice of fan service, and he advocated for a supersized episode about Bill and Frank’s relationship and a flashback showing Ellie’s mother and the origins of her immunity. But now that the original creator is stepping down, the fan is adapting the rest of the game on his own. Mazin can go off half-cocked, creating lackluster original characters like Gail and Kathleen, and Druckmann won’t be there to rein him in. The biggest problem with Mazin’s writing, compared to the games, is the brazen lack of subtext. While Druckmann would say a lot of things without saying them, Mazin just has every character say how they’re feeling out loud. In the games, it’s crystal clear that Joel and Ellie love each other as father and daughter without actually referring to Joel as Ellie’s “dad,” but the TV series never misses an opportunity to make an overt reference to their, in TV Ellie’s words, “daddy-daughter” relationship. Now that Druckmann has left the writers’ room, The Last of Us season 3 could keep doubling down on that heavy-handed approach to emotional storytelling.