The Last Of Us season 2 will be shorter than season 1, somehow

A couple of months back—around the time that casting notices made it clear that Craig Mazin’s TV adaptation of The Last Of Us was really going there, in terms of adapting ultra-brutal, best-selling video game The Last Of Us Part II with its second season—we penned an essay trying to grapple with what a TV version of that particular game might look like, and how it would function. This was no small question, largely for reasons that constitute pretty massive spoilers, both for the games, and for any even-halfway faithful adaptation of it.

One guess we never would have ventured, meanwhile, was “By making fewer episodes for the show’s second season than the first.” The Last Of Us Part II is, after all, a much bigger game than the original, so the idea that the show’s next set of episodes would be trimmed—down to 7 episodes, say—never crossed our minds. But that’s exactly what Mazin (working with collaborator Neil Druckmann, creative director for the game franchise) is doing, per Deadline, confirming that the new season, which will debut in 2025, will be shorter than the nine-episode first.

Of course, those seven new episodes won’t cover all of The Last Of Us Part II; in fact, Mazin’s not sure they’ll be able to fit the entire game into two seasons, suggesting the show might run to a fourth to pack it all in. “We don’t think that we’re going to be able to tell the story even within two seasons [2 and 3] because we’re taking our time and go down interesting pathways which we did a little bit in Season 1 too. We feel like it’s almost assuredly going to be the case,” Mazin said, “That — as long as people keep watching and we can keep making more television — Season 3 will be significantly larger. And indeed, the story may require Season 4.”

The Last Of Us show was a critical and commercial success, gaining especial praise for its largely standalone third episode, “Long, Long Time”—and its adaptation of the first game’s tragic, emotionally complicated ending. Meanwhile, we’re still not sure how the show will end up handling what is, essentially, the inciting incident of the second game—there’s no way, to our mind, that they can hold off on it for a whole season of TV, because neither the show, nor the game, works without it—but it’s also a huge, aggressive swing. We’ll know more when The Last Of Us returns to HBO in 2025.