The Last Of Us’ Critic And Audience Scores Are Nothing Short Of Miraculous

I cannot get over just how well The Last of Us premiere went on HBO this past week. Yes, both to me personally as a fan of the original game, but more in general, in terms of how it’s being received by both the critic class and average viewers. The scores it’s racked up here are nothing short of astonishing, for different reasons.

The Last of Us current has a 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 117 critics. I believe most of them have seen the first four episodes, so that’s moving beyond the impressive pilot, indicating it maintains its quality as it goes. Some have seen all nine episodes, I think.

To put that 99% score in perspective, we’ll have to go back to 2022 to get a full list to compare it to. Generally speaking, yes, TV scores skew higher than movies, and there are in fact 21 seasons of shows that scored a perfect 100% last year. However, there are fewer TV critics and than movie critics in general, and while The Last of Us has 117 reviews, there are zero 100% shows that have anywhere close to that many reviews. Most are between 25-50 reviews instead.

So, The Last of Us can better be compared to something like Barry season 3 (99%, 109 reviews) or Better Call Saul season 6 (99%, 179 reviews) or The Boys season 3 (98%, 149 reviews). Up there with high quality, already-established series.

And audience scores? To me, this is the more miraculous part. The Last of Us currently has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 9.4/10 on IMDB from thousands of user reviews, almost universal consensus about how great the series is. Among TV fans, and a mix of video game and TV fans? That’s astonishing, especially given all the pre-air controversies the show had.

• There are “progressive” issues that sometimes cause baseless review bombing, where Joel and Tommy are now played by Latino actors, and Joel’s daughter is non-white, which are changes from the game.
• There are more general casting controversies, as there was initial skepticism over Bella Ramsey’s casting in the beloved Ellie role because she didn’t look that similar to the game character.
• There’s skepticism about video game adaptations in general, and especially about The Last of Us which is beloved by many players who thought it did not remotely need an adaptation. And some things were changed from the original game.
• There’s the fact that The Last of Us has become a hugely controversial series, namely because of the events of Part 2 of the games, which could have spilled over into sentiment about the show here.

But…none of this mattered. Casting questions were put to rest by incredible performances from all actors involved. Source material concerns did not pan out given how faithful the show was to the game, and what was changed was often for the better.

I do worry about what will happen when we reach Part 2 of the games next season and how both gamer and non-gamer audiences will react to its opening, but that’s an issue for another day.

The point being, for a show that seemed destined to attract all manner of controversy, it overcome it all by just…being extremely good and executing on every front where people had concerns. Just an incredible feat. Cannot wait for more.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.