by Monitor A weekly column From movies to memes, from TV to Twitter, WIRED is dedicated to everything that happens in the cultural world.
I’m not necessarily the “I told you so” type of person at WIRED offices. Frankly, in such a smart workplace, I’m more of a “no, no, you’re right” team player. But on Monday morning, my colleagues jumped in to talk about last Sunday’s episode on Slack. what’s left of usAll I could think was, “I warned you.”
Granted, I only warned a few. But as one of the editors behind Will Bedingfield’s great post on bringing Naughty Dog’s video game to HBO and Hemal Jhaveri’s adorable Q&A the last of us star Pedro Pascal, I had an early look at the show, and when someone asked, I’d say, “Episode 3 made me cry.”
The third installment of the series – the love story between editor Bill (Nick Offerman) and a man named Frank (Murray Bartlett) who is stranded on his property – is a departure from both the main plot of the HBO series and the gameplay it plays. based on. Bill is a character in the game, but not a playable character, and Frank is only mentioned in passing. Extending their story was one of the many ways series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (who is also the game’s producer) sought to transform it. the last of us into the game the last of us prestigious tv show. “I said, ‘Neil, I have a crazy idea,'” Mazin said. Show Fair. “And it was like, ‘Do it. Let see how is it going to be.'”
Gambling worked. Sunday’s broadcast of “Long Long Time” garnered 6.4 million viewers, up 12 percent from the previous episode, and 1.8 million more than the premiere of the series. (This multiplication is important considering the last of usnetwork brother, dragon house, the third episode was already losing viewers.) Streams of the Linda Ronstadt song, after which the episode is named, increased by 4,900 percent on Spotify. Jimmy Kimmel showed Offerman on his late night show TikToks of fans’ tearful reactions to the episode. And Twitter couldn’t stop talking about it. personal favorite: “what’s left of us The writers were like, ‘Hey, Joel needs a car. What if we write down the most touching and heartbreaking television hour in the world.”
It was that rare episode of television that started thousands of thought pieces. Vulture declared the episode a Rosetta gem that “unlocks the adaptation.” rolling rock He called it “a painfully beautiful love story”. Inverse asked director Peter Hoar to decode the final take. Multiple outlets called it a masterpiece.
As with every statement, there was a reaction. Druckmann himself had foretold this. New Yorker “As great as this episode is, there will be fans who are offended by it.” Druckmann’s creation received frequent criticism around its quirky characters, and he rightly knew that some fans would not like what his show did with Bill’s story. Some have called it “a dreadful axis in the guise of positive representation”. Others called it the “empty feeling”. The episode was said to be an example of the “bury your gays” trope; other critics claimed it was a subversion of this trope. (The latter is closer to the truth.) And so on.
