HBO’s The Last of Us Has Limitless Potential — With or Without Joel and Ellie

Warning: The below article contains full spoilers through Episode 7 of HBO’s The Last of Us.

At this point, there’s no arguing it: HBO’s The Last of Us is officially a hit. 

Not only has the adaptation of the Naughty Dog game scored critical acclaim (IGN gave the full first season a 9/10, calling it “a brilliant retelling of one of video games’ most beloved stories that rebottles the lightning of what made it so special to many in the first place”), but its ratings speak for themselves, so far outpacing HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon. Unsurprisingly, it’s already been renewed for Season 2. 

Game creator and show executive producer Neil Druckmann previously confirmed that Season 2 will follow the devastating plot of The Last of Us Part II – and showrunner Craig Mazin hinted that that story will take multiple seasons to tell – but the storytelling potential behind The Last of Us doesn’t stop there. 

If The Last of Us’ first season has proven anything, it’s that Druckmann and Mazin aren’t phoning it in when adapting the game. While Season 1 has largely stuck to the source material’s storyline thus far, they’ve made some key changes – and, notably, some of these changes have had little to do with Ellie and Joel’s journey across the U.S. 

While our key duo is our anchor in Season 1, the series has seemingly gone out of its way to show us just how many stories there are to tell in this apocalyptic world. Should the creatives choose to build out those stories, could HBO have a franchise on its hands beyond the stories already told in the games?

The Power of Side Characters and a Rich World

Until Part II, The Last of Us game didn’t really deviate from that core story of Ellie and Joel traveling across the country (and, even when Part II did come along, it was still a continuation of that core story). Just by the very nature of the medium, the player stays anchored to Joel in the first game, navigating the world in his shoes. But the HBO series has taken advantage of telling its story on television in several ways, leaving the core duo to have us spend time with other characters. 

The first – and perhaps most notable – occurrence of this comes in Episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” which devoted nearly an entire chapter to two characters who weren’t nearly as fleshed-out in the game, Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). Frank, of course, is hardly in the game at all, and we only see Bill in relation to his interactions with Joel. 

In removing that anchor to Joel and crafting an entire original story around two characters who were barely explored in the game, “Long, Long Time” delivered not only one of the best episodes of The Last of Us, but set a couple of early trends that would be seen throughout Season 1. The first trend – which had already been established with some more minor changes – was that the adaptation wouldn’t be afraid to take a big swing and deviate from the source material where necessary. Secondly, it proved that Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) wouldn’t be the only characters we’re crying over.

Episode 4 was a bit of a return to the familiar, showing Ellie and Joel bonding and making their way to Wyoming. But Episode 5, “Endure and Survive,” built out the world quite a bit by bringing us to Kansas City and introducing people like the menacing Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) and the immediately sympathetic – and, as we’d later learn, incredibly complex – Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard). While our time is limited with the two brothers, The Last of Us does a phenomenal job of letting us get to know them within such a short amount of time, to the point where their death scene is one of the most devastating in the entire show. 

All of these side characters – Bill, Frank, Kathleen, Henry, Sam, and even Elaine Miles and Graham Greene’s scene-stealing couple at the beginning of Episode 6 – could’ve justified more time on the show. But it’s not just the people; the rich world they inhabit is part of the appeal too, and another strong argument on why there could be more stories told within it. “Endure and Survive,” for one, showed a Kansas City in sociopolitical shambles, painting an intriguing picture of not just the people within its different factions, but the troubled state in which those factions formed. 

The HBO show even had The Last of Us’ first glimpse of how the pandemic was handled outside of North America, with Episode 2 opening as it broke out in Jakarta. Explaining the decision on HBO’s The Last of Us podcast (via Mashable), Druckmann said the games were a love letter to Americana, and thus “we made the conscious choice to never leave the United States.” 

But in the TV series, Mazin explained that they “wanted to show also that it was global, that this wasn’t just happening in America. This was the world.”

All of this proves not just The Last of Us’ ability in telling character-driven stories, but ones also driven by lore and a rich world. There’s lots of potential around the edges of Joel and Ellie, and not only have the creatives proven their ability to tap into it, but there’s plenty of business incentive to as well.

Everyone Wants Their Franchise

For many, The Last of Us is Joel and Ellie, and although other characters have been introduced along the way, it ultimately circles back to them. But I do think there could be a future that delves more heavily into stories outside of Ellie and Joel. 

The fact is that everyone’s looking for a franchise and while that’s been the case on the big screen ever since Marvel Studios struck gold, it’s true on TV as well. Take Paramount Network’s hit Yellowstone, for example, which has spawned multiple spinoffs with plans for more. Or, maybe even more appropriately, look at The Walking Dead, the zombie show that The Last of Us has frequently been compared to, which has inspired not one, not two, but six spinoff shows.

HBO has been getting in on the franchise model too, having landed a hit with House of the Dragon with a number of other Game of Thrones spinoffs tentatively in the works as well. And, in a recent interview with Variety, HBO content chief Casey Bloys even admitted that his faith wasn’t in the game itself, but in Mazin (who previously worked with the premium cable network on Chernobyl) and his passion for its world.

“I don’t even play video games, but we were betting on Craig, not the game,” Bloys said. “You want someone who is so invested in the world and knows why things happen, why they wouldn’t happen, so you can have a real conversation and a real back-and-forth. You want someone who’s got an unshakable knowledge of ‘Here’s the way we see the world, here are the themes we’re going for.’ The more he knows about it and the more excited he is, the better it is for us.”

We won’t venture into giving HBO too many ideas, but with the network’s confidence in the world in mind, in addition to Druckmann and Mazin’s proven ability to tell various stories within it, there are pretty much limitless possibilities when it comes to The Last of Us spinoffs, from anthology series to prequels to sequels to everything in between. 

And, in an entertainment landscape where franchises are the name of the game, is a larger The Last of Us TV universe really so hard to imagine?