The Last of Us showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have just dropped a bombshell: the second season of HBO's hit post-apocalyptic drama, which is set to return in 2025, will only run for seven episodes. And what's more, the series could run for as long as four seasons, with the next three seasons adapting the dense material from The Last of Us Part II video game. So we're getting less The Last of Us soon, but likely more The Last of Us in the long run!
This all comes from Deadline, which dropped a lengthy interview with Druckmann and Mazin that was conducted a few months back during the first week of filming on The Last of Us season 2. Mazin and Druckmann discussed their overarching plans for the television series, including how they arrived at the shortened episode count for season 2, something they assure fans came about as a result of "natural breakpoints" in the narrative rather than any sort of episode mandate from HBO.
“The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons,” Mazin said. “When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season, the breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.”
"We don’t think that we’re going to be able to tell the story even within two seasons [2 and 3] because we’re taking our time and go down interesting pathways which we did a little bit in Season 1 too. We feel like it’s almost assuredly going to be the case that — as long as people keep watching and we can keep making more television — Season 3 will be significantly larger. And indeed, the story may require Season 4."Craig Mazin
Mazin sounds pretty certain that The Last of Us could continue on past season 3. While season 2 will have fewer episodes, later in the interview Mazin teased that the third season would be “significantly larger" in scope. “One thing is absolutely for sure, I don’t see how we could tell the story that remains after Season 2 is complete in one more season."
From where I'm sitting, this makes a lot of sense. The Last of Us Part II video game did some really wild things with its narrative structure; it's way more complicated than the first game, which formed the basis for season 1. The story jumps back and forth in time, changes perspective, and does a bunch of other things that might require the television show to take some radical steps to keep things coherent. Off the top of my head, I can already think of two major moments in the first half of The Last of Us Part II that could serve as "natural breakpoints" for the story. Mazin and Druckmann sound like they don't want to rush through any of it, which is a good thing.
“We just want to put people’s minds at ease that the idea that this season coming up is a little bit shorter than the first one is not because we’re taking less time to tell the stories, it’s because we want to take more time,” Mazin said. “The story that we’re telling is much bigger than the story of Season 1, there’s just a lot more going on, it’s a lot harder to produce but we want every episode to feel like its own blockbuster to be honest with you.”
Will The Last of Us go beyond its video game source material?
Talk of a fourth season begs the question: will The Last of Us will go beyond the events of The Last of Us Part II video game? After all, the show adapted the first game in a single season; spending three whole seasons on the second is a pretty big step up. Then there's the question of a potential third video game in the trilogy, which is all but confirmed to be in very early stages of development at game studio Naughty Dog.
“As a fan, I’m thrilled that there might be a third Last of Us game. As the co-creator of this television show, there’s no world where I would want our show to go beyond the source material that people have in the world,” Mazin said. “Our show as people know it on HBO is going to cover the material from the second game and then quite a bit of material that is relevant to that story but, as I said, wanders down interesting new paths, unseen stories that were told within the context of that games material.”
Deadline says that Neil Druckmann — who created the video games — wouldn't address any questions about a potential The Last of Us Part III game, and that he hasn't discussed it even with Mazin.
“Our focus is the two games,” Druckmann said. “As Craig mentioned, there’s quite a bit of material there that we’re taking our time with, and we’re looking at each piece individually to make sure it’s got its own arc, its own journey that the characters go on, but there is a grander plan that ties all the seasons together.”
“Pretty much, we have a pretty good concept of how that will work,” Mazin said of the overall plan for the series and its future seasons. “I think what happens naturally when you really begin to focus on a season and where that natural breakpoint should occur then, who knows? It’s a good theory, once we put it in practice, who knows?”
"I don’t see a world where we go through and we go, that’s shorter than we thought. We are committed to delivering people great seasons and arcs, and HBO was amazing about this. They let us pick that natural spot. Instead of us having to figure out how to create seasons around an artificial number, we create the length of the seasons around the story and how we are telling it."
It may all come back to narrative structure, something The Last of Us Part II is famous for thanks to some truly daring risks it takes. Druckmann said that "structure is incredibly important to us" for developing season 2 of the TV series. “Our process was, we sketched out multiple seasons, then we did a deep dive on Season 2,” he said. “To echo what Craig is saying, there is no padding, everything that is in there is intentional. There is always a goal in mind that we’re heading towards, we are never meandering the sake of meandering, it’s always to say something greater for these characters and the themes.”
And what are these themes exactly? If The Last of Us Part I and the show's first season were about how unconditional love could change people for better or worse, then Part II is a dark, terrifying journey into revenge and how it can twist a person to make them unrecognizable. “More specifically, it’s a continuation of love from the first season, and this is just the dark side of that coin, the pursuit of justice at any cost for the ones you love and the exploration of that,” Druckmann said.
The Last of Us season 2 has an episode that is "quite big"
Despite the shortened episode count, Mazin teased that the second season will feature one particularly large episode. Bring on the set pieces!
“Season 1 really was a 10-episode length season in hours,” Mazin said. “And certainly in Season 2, there’s an episode that is going to be again closer to — I don’t know if I would say feature length but quite big. I like generally hitting about an hour, it’s a great length, I love working in that format. What we don’t want to do is, say a season of seven episodes where each episode is 90 minutes; part of why we’re doing seven episodes is finding that nice line.”
Here's to hoping that they found that perfect balance. The Last of Us season 2 is currently filming. We'll see how its seven-episode second season is received when it debuts on HBO sometime in 2025.
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