The Last of Us: A More Mature Take on The Walking Dead’s Tropes

Although its popularity has plummeted since its heyday, The Walking Dead was once the biggest show on TV. It was so huge that it inspired a wave of knockoffs. Everyone in Hollywood got on the zombie trend, from low-budget copycats like Z Nation to big-budget blockbusters like World War Z. In 2013, Naughty Dog released the umpteenth zombie game of its era and completely revolutionized the genre. The Last of Us put less emphasis on the zombies themselves and more on the surrogate father and daughter driving the story.

A decade later, Neil Druckmann adapted his own game for television and did it all over again. By 2023, the post-Walking Dead zombie craze was well and truly over, and The Walking Dead itself had been reduced to an endless slog of little-seen spinoffs. In the midst of this barren wasteland, Druckmann teamed up with Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin to adapt The Last of Us for television and, with the exact same story he’d told a decade ago, he revitalized the zombie genre once again.

In both game and TV form, The Last of Us plays on a lot of the familiar tropes and conventions popularized by The Walking Dead: using the zombies as a metaphor, dividing the remnants of humanity into a series of cults and communities, and peddling the now-overdone message that the real enemy in a zombie apocalypse is human nature. The zombies aren’t the real monsters; the other survivors are. But The Last of Us tackles that fragile post-apocalyptic psychology in a much more nuanced, much more human way than The Walking Dead’s oft-cartoonish meltdowns.

The Last Of Us Is A More Mature Take On The Walking Dead’s Tropes

HBO / Courtesy Everett Collection

When the original video game hit shelves, The Walking Dead was still on the air, just hitting its stride. Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors were moving from community to community, battling with Woodbury, getting misled by Terminus, taking shelter in Alexandria. The Last of Us takes place in a similar post-apocalyptic new world order, where survivors have devolved into tribalism. Peaceful utopias like Jackson are few and far between; most of these communities are a lawless free-for-all rife with cannibalism and slavery.

The Walking Dead was already pretty dark, but The Last of Us is a much darker take on the same tropes. There are cannibals in The Walking Dead, but none as sinister as The Last of Us’ David. The Last of Us is a more mature and nuanced take on those tropes, too. When The Walking Dead wants to show Rick grieving his late wife, it has her ghost show up to haunt him. When The Last of Us wants to show Joel grieving his late daughter, he just looks down at his broken watch.

The Last Of Us Is What The Walking Dead Would’ve Looked Like On HBO

Druckmann and Mazin’s TV adaptation of The Last of Us ended up being an HBO version of The Walking Dead. Whereas The Walking Dead is a zombie-infested version of a soap opera, The Last of Us is a zombie-infested version of a sobering HBO drama like Six Feet Under. The Walking Dead is an action-packed thrill-ride, with a handful of zombie-laden set-pieces in every single episode, but The Last of Us is much quieter and more character-focused.

The Last of Us is basically what The Walking Dead would’ve looked like if it had been picked up by HBO. Before AMC got their hands on it, Frank Darabont pitched The Walking Dead to HBO, but they turned it down. More than a decade later, HBO eventually greenlit their own zombie series. Since video games are entirely action-driven, and quieter dramatic scenes come at a premium, Druckmann used the freedom of the TV medium to deliberately scale back the action and hone in on the quieter dramatic stuff.