The Last of Us season three "certainly seems" to be the TV show’s last, reckons HBO chief

HBO’s The Last of Us TV adaptation is likely ending with its upcoming third season, according to network CEO Casey Bloys. Speaking to Deadline, that boy Bloys used his voice to address the noise that the joys of the Naughty Dog-inspired series would end with season three, saying “It certainly seems that way.” Pedro Pascal’s dreams, destroyed.

Bloys did add that “on decisions like that, we will defer to the showrunners,” which in The Last of Us’ case is Craig Mazin, also the creator of Chernobyl (the show, not the nuclear disaster). The same Craig Mazin who told Collider, during the airing of the well-received second season, that “there’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season.” Which might be reassuring to some, though a) Bloy’s comments are a lot more up-to-date than Mazin’s and b) if network executives truly knew how to “defer” to showrunners, we might have had more than six measly episodes of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.

Still, at current rates of adaptivisation, Mazin might have a point. The Last of Us’ first season was a fairly faithful creation of the original zombies ‘n’ sadness game, and while season two tinkered more with its take on TLOU Part II, it ultimately covered less than half of the latter’s notoriously bleak story. Season three of the show could just be longer, though.

Plans may also have changed in light of TLOU game director Neil Druckmann, who was co-showrunning the adapatation with Mazin, leaving to focus back on Naughty Dog. The Sony-owned dev house is currently working on science fiction adventure Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, though if Druckmann’s return from Tinseltown was meant to help keep it on track, that maybe hasn’t panned out: reports emerged late last year that staff were put under mandatory crunch to finish an internal demo, an alleged return to the brutal work conditions that plagued development of The Last of Us Part II.