The Last of Us is a better show than it is a game, and that's fine

Here is the sentence that gets me in trouble. The shooting was always the weakest part of The Last of Us, and the show is better for having almost none of it.

Naughty Dog wrote a story about a man who lost a daughter and then, over a year on the road, decided one particular girl was worth more to him than every other person alive. That is a good story. It is a story about a very small number of people.

Then, in between those scenes, Joel kills what has to be several hundred human beings. Not infected. People. A lot of them with his hands.

Nothing in the writing is wrong. The problem is that the writing and the playing are making different cases, and you spend far more minutes on the playing.

Cut it. Not all of it, but most, and it did not fill the runtime back up with action. It filled it with people talking in rooms.

The obvious example is the third episode, which is almost entirely invented. Bill and Frank barely exist in the game. On the show they get an hour and a whole life, and it is the best thing either version has ever done, and there is almost no violence in it at all.

That episode is only possible because the show is not obliged to be fun to operate for eight minutes at a stretch.

I am not saying the game is bad. The game is remarkable and the show does not exist without it. I am saying the game was carrying a load it did not need to carry, because it came out in 2013 on a machine where a story like that had to be delivered in the gaps between encounters.

The right response to that is not defensiveness. It is that this is what a good adaptation is for. It found the part that was fighting the material and it took it out. That is a harder and more respectful thing to do than reproducing every set piece with a bigger budget.