What to watch now on monday when i get back from work 😥

Some interesting viewership data. The following ratings are from the U.S. only and exclusively on analog television, so they exclude most viewers, it's worth noting, but having a consistent metric gives us a portrait of the trendline:

Episode 1: 588,000
Episode 2: 633,000
Episode 3: 747,000
Episode 4: 991,000
Episode 5: 382,000
Episode 6: 841,000
Episode 7: 1,083,000
Episode 8: 1,039,000
Episode 9: 1,040,000

The only episode to see a real drop-off was the fifth (Endure and Survive), which is likely owed to it being dropped a couple days early to avoid competing with the Super Bowl. The final episode drew over a million American viewers on HBO alone, and a record of 8.2 million viewers worldwide overall across all platforms, despite competing with the Oscars (in which Pedro Pascal was among the presenters, mind you). Outside the U.S., The Last of Us is the number one most-viewed HBO Max program to date, and even in the U.S. it's second only to House of the Dragon. I'd say it's a hit.

In terms of critical reception, Long, Long Time (episode 3) was the critical favorite, with the final episode, Look for the Light, getting the most divided (but still very positive) reception. Think I can understand that. Show basically tracked the game's content with the exception of Long, Long Time. I agree with TallSillhouette in that I think I marginally preferred the game's version of events where they diverged in most cases, with the exception of Long, Long Time. But I'm still very glad that both versions of this story exist. The Last of Us is by far the best TV adaptation of a video game ever as far as I'm concerned.

The second season will presumably cover Part 2, but since the second game is twice as long as the original, it would therefore have to feature twice as many episodes at minimum to cover the whole game. Or they could divide it into halves, giving Ellie's chapter its own season and reserving Abby's for a third season. I'm okay with either approach; whichever gets us more of this level of care. I will say though that, selfishly, I'd also like for the Part 2 material to include some of the content that's only referenced in Ellie's diary entries in the game, like her past relationship with Cat for example, and maybe a little more background on the past relationship between Dina and Jesse. Maybe it could be in a dedicated past romance episode akin to Long, Long Time even. There's lots of material that got scrapped or reduced to journal entries in the final game because it had to be streamlined more. Here's a chance to reintegrate some of that content back into the story, methinks!

I read somewhere that they will probably do 2 seasons, but that they will keep it the way it is in the game and not split it between Ellie and Abby. They will keep switching between them, which I think is smart, since you miss a lot of things if you only focus on one of them at a time. You also have the flashback sections with both characters, I hope they start filming this year and release the first batch of episodes in 2024. It would suck if we had to wait more than 2 years.

Oh well, to clarify, what I meant was...well maybe I'd better break down the structure of the game as I see it. If we can say that Part 2 is divided into an opening chapter, a two-part main body (half Ellie's chapter, half Abby's), and a concluding chapter, it's the intro and the concluding sections that have a mixture of Ellie-focused and Abby-focused scenes. All the stuff around Seattle, by contrast, is neatly divided between Ellie's journey and Abby's. What I meant to suggest before was the possibility that the TV series might divide that in half, with season 2 covering everything up to the end of Ellie's journey through Seattle and season 3 picking up with Abby's and concluding at the end of the game's content.

The show most likely won’t follow the same narrative structure as the game. Abby will probably be introduced very early on, to set her path towards Joel in parallel with Ellie’s. In the game, it was done separately because constantly switching between both characters in short sequences would have broken the gameplay beats, what with both having different upgrades and whatnot. But with the show, they don’t have to worry about that. I think it has the potential to be better told and have better pacing than the game.

I can see the very first scene you see in season 2 will be Abby rushing to the surgery room, finding her dead father and reacting to it. Then they’ll continue with “current day” Ellie getting ready for her watch round. They very well could decide to start with whatever happened during that 5 years gap, showing us more of the relationship between Joel and Ellie instead of relying exclusively on flashbacks like in the game. And then the rest of the season switching back and forth between Ellie and Abby, as we learn more about Ellie’s grudge against Joel, and with Abby slowly zoning in on Joel’s location. With the series finale showing her finally getting revenge on him. That’d be one heck of a season cliffhanger for those who haven’t played the game.

That's certainly an interesting possibility! Part 2 was originally supposed to be an open world adventure taking place mainly in and around Jackson wherein Abby gets her revenge at point determined by the player. Much of the content planned for that version of the game was eventually scrapped or changed into flashbacks or diary entries. It's possible that season 2 could take us down a narrative path similar to what was originally intended for the game. I think that's essentially what you're suggesting here at least. However, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason the game was streamlined into the more linear structure we know was because the overarching storyline kept changing and the material needed to be streamlined in order to establish the right sense and balance of tension. In other words, the pacing of the story beats would've been adversely affected by leaving it an open world adventure. When you think about it that way, it makes you wonder if changing the medium from video game to TV show would necessarily alter the plot structure calculations so fundamentally as you suggest.