The Last Of Us Does What No Show Has Done Before

It’s day one in America. Naughty Dog filmed motion-capture performances from real actors to put tangible fear in Joel’s and Sarah’s eyes, and it gave the characters movie-worthy dialog. The game’s world was designed to make players feel like they’d walked into a film about the first day of the apocalypse: They can explore every angle of a scene and find nothing artificial. The TV adaptation—cocreated by Neil Druckmann, who made the game, and Craig Mazin, the mind behind Chernobyl—translates the famous opening faithfully, maintaining the tension and horror of Joel and Sarah ’s attempted escape. The sequence is heightened by scenes that wouldn’t work in a game but show us what Joel and Sarah’s lives were like before the world started to fall apart.