‘The Last of Us’ star expects story to extend into at least three seasons

HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us turned out to be a resounding success, to the point where a second season adapting the events of The Last of Us Part II was almost immediately greenlit.

With the first season covering the events of the first game, it’s only to be expected that season two will attempt to do the same for the sequel – but is another 9-10 hours of television going to be enough to cover an objectively much beefier story? One of the stars acutely familiar with both the game and the show doesn’t think so.

Jeffrey Pierce, The Last of Us’s original Tommy, and  the man who brought life to Perry in HBO’s live-action adaptation, told The Direct that he thinks the show will need to stretch into a third season in order to do The Last of Us Part II justice:

“I think they’ll stretch it beyond a second season, because there’s just so much story to tell in the second game.”

Pierce has something of a point, considering that the average playthrough time of The Last of Us is around 15 hours, whereas The Last of Us Part II clocks in at around 24 hours, via HowLongToBeat. Granted, the sequel is padded with a few more lengthy gameplay sections which the HBO adaptation could ignore, but it still has a lot of narrative layers which require unpacking.

We’ll likely be waiting for a while to see how HBO ends up tackling the sequel season, but at the very least, episode six gave us a potential tease of a key character that will be introduced later down the line.

In the meantime, we’ve still got three episodes of The Last of Us season one to go, airing every Sunday on HBO Max.