The Last of Us

Season 2 shifts the weight of the show towards a new cast. Kaitlyn Dever plays Abby Anderson, a role so central to the back half of the saga that her casting became one of the most discussed television stories of 2025. Isabela Merced plays Dina, Young Mazino plays Jesse, Jeffrey Wright plays Isaac, Catherine O'Hara plays Gail, with Danny Ramirez and Ariela Barer rounding out the Seattle-set ensemble.

🧠 What It Is Really About

You can sell the show as zombies and it will find an audience, but that is a category error. The Cordyceps infected (the "Runners" in their fast early-stage form, the "Clickers" once fungal growth has destroyed their sight and reshaped their heads) are the backdrop, not the story. What the show is really about is grief, and what you owe the people you love, and the cycle of violence that loving them can set in motion.

Joel is a parent who lost a child before the pandemic was even a week old. Twenty years of numbness later, Ellie starts to look like a second chance he does not think he deserves. The show watches him reckon with that slowly, through small choices, across months of travel. Ramsey plays Ellie as wary, funny, stubborn, and gradually willing to let him in. The relationship is the spine of the thing.

The trolley-problem ending of the first game is played straight for television audiences here, without flinching and without letting anyone off the hook.

Season 2 takes what the Season 1 finale set up and runs with it, following the Naughty Dog sequel into territory that is genuinely hard to watch. The show is interested in what happens when love curdles into revenge and revenge meets other people's love. Heavy material. Mazin shoots it like prestige drama because it is prestige drama.

🎨 Style and Atmosphere

Visually, the show sits somewhere between Mazin's Chernobyl and the glossier end of HBO's post-apocalyptic catalogue. Wet concrete. Overgrown interstate. Rotten wood swallowed by ivy. The infected sequences are used sparingly, which is exactly why they land so hard when they do. The Bill and Frank episode almost never shows infected at all, and is still the most moving hour the show has produced.

The music, scored by Gustavo Santaolalla who composed both games, is one of the secret weapons. Those spare guitar motifs do an enormous amount of lifting. If you played the games you will recognise them instantly and feel twelve years old again.

📈 Reception and Legacy

Season 1 arrived in January 2023 and was a cultural event by its third episode. The Bill and Frank hour won Murray Bartlett an Emmy, put Nick Offerman in frame for every best-supporting-actor conversation of that year, and did more to legitimise video games as narrative source material than any previous adaptation. The series won eight Primetime Emmys across its first season, with Ramsey and Pascal both nominated for lead acting.

Season 2's reception was more complicated. The game it adapted was polarising among fans, the Kaitlyn Dever casting became a flashpoint, and the show had to make structural decisions about pacing and point of view that split opinion. The critical consensus stayed strong. The fandom consensus fractured along the same lines it did for the 2020 game.

Whatever you think of where Season 2 goes, it is doing it on purpose. This is not accidental writing. Mazin and Druckmann signed up for the hard version.

As an adaptation, the show cleared a bar nobody had cleared before. The comparison is not to other zombie shows. It is to high-end grief dramas and post-collapse literary fiction of the last twenty years.

🏆 Why It Works

Most post-apocalypse TV spends its energy on worldbuilding. The Last of Us spends its energy on two people. The world is enormously detailed, but the show only ever cares about the world because of what it means for Joel and Ellie. That discipline is why it hits where it hits.

It also helps that the people making it love the source and refuse to condescend to it. Mazin treats this story with the same weight he gave Chernobyl. Druckmann, who wrote and built the games from the inside, is not protecting his own work from reinterpretation, he is re-opening it. The result is one of the very few adaptations where the TV version is a genuine creative partner to the source rather than a victory lap.

I would put it up there with the best HBO shows of the 2020s. Full stop. If you like grown-up genre storytelling of the Silo and The Expanse sort, this is required viewing. If you want the closest prestige-TV cousin to what Severance does with identity, The Last of Us does with grief.

Ashley Johnson

Anna (Ellie's mother)