The Last Of Us Is No Longer TV's Best Video Game Show Thanks To A 94% RT Hit

Published Sep 13, 2026, 1:00 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. When The Last of Us premiered on HBO in 2023, it seemed as though the video game adaptation curse had been lifted. In collaboration with Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann adapted his own seminal video game into a prestige TV drama, and that timeless tale of a surrogate parent and child seeking hope in a hopeless world made its way to a whole new audience. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey deftly recaptured Joel and Ellie’s reluctant father-daughter relationship without just doing a carbon copy of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson’s performances. Mazin and Druckmann used the freedom of this new medium to expand the worldbuilding and explore other characters’ perspectives. We saw the early days of the Cordyceps outbreak in Indonesia, we saw Ellie’s mother give birth to her, we saw the inner workings of the Q.Z.s — everything you might’ve been curious about while playing the game, they added to the TV show. The Last of Us was a monster success; it was universally lauded by critics and became a Game of Thrones-sized blockbuster hit for HBO. The top brass at HBO wasted no time renewing The Last of Us for a second season, and Mazin and Druckmann got to work adapting The Last of Us Part II. The sequel is a much bigger, unwieldier, more ambitious game, with a nonlinear narrative and two separate perspectives of the same events, so it was always going to be tricky to turn into a TV show. But, even taking that into account, The Last of Us season 2 was pretty dismal. Everything season 1 did right, season 2 did wrong. Every change to the source material weakened the narrative instead of enhancing it. Very few of the superfluous flashbacks and villain P.O.V. scenes actually added anything important, and the writing threw subtlety and subtext to the wolves. HBO’s The Last of Us has proven that it’s capable of achieving true greatness on par with the games — even the dreaded second season had a couple of solid episodes (the episode where Joel died and the flashback episode both come to mind) — but it’s also capable of deeply disappointing terribleness. Fallout, on the other hand, has been refreshingly consistent. Fallout Has Dethroned The Last Of Us As The Best Video Game Show On TV While The Last of Us’ first season remains a spot-on adaptation of the original game and one of the best TV seasons of the 2020s to date, the second season let down the series as a whole. Fallout is an interesting comparison. It’s another TV adaptation of a post-apocalyptic video game franchise that burst onto the scene with a stellar debut season, and season 2 had a lot to live up to. But, where The Last of Us spectacularly fumbled its second season, Fallout nailed it. In season 1, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy pulled off the daunting challenge of turning a series of blank-slate RPGs, whose storylines and characters depend entirely on the players’ choices, into a single, cohesive drama. They brought the wastelands of Fallout to life in live-action, and used a bunch of different perspective characters to explore different facets of that world: a gunslinger out in the wild; a naive kid living in an underground bunker; a soldier fighting the unwinnable war against mutant monstrosities. In season 2, they paired up their two best characters — Lucy and the Ghoul, two diametrically opposed heroes — and introduced the coolest setting from the games: New Vegas. Where The Last of Us season 2 had been a drastic step down in quality, Fallout season 2 might’ve even been an improvement over season 1. Fallout and The Last of Us are both great, but neither of them is actually the best TV show based on a video game franchise — that would be Arcane, Netflix’s animated masterpiece set in the League of Legends universe. Regardless of its attachment to a gaming universe, Arcane is just one of the best TV shows of the past decade. If you’re a League of Legends fan, there are plenty of Easter eggs to spot. But even if you’ve never even heard of the games, this is a quintessential sci-fi saga. It’s the ultimate tale of the rebels of the underworld rising up against the ruling class of the overworld, and losing themselves along the way. Fallout 8/10 Release Date April 10, 2024 Network Amazon Prime Video Showrunner Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan