'The Last of Us' Isn’t Better Than 'The Walking Dead'

Everything 'The Last of Us' does, 'The Walking Dead' did more brutally a decade ago

What am I gonna do about my legs, Abby Murphy? Liane Hentscher/HBO; Hannah Roman

I was listening to Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan talk about HBO’s postapocalyptic horror drama The Last of Us on The Watch recently, and Andy asked a question: “What is the fundamental difference between this show now and The Walking Dead?” The Last of Us has higher production values and top-shelf actors like Jeffrey Wright and Melanie Lynskey, but caliber wasn’t really what he was talking about. “On a foundational level, a show about people scrabbling through an apocalyptic zombie wilderness discovering that the real monsters are people all along — it’s Walking Dead,” he said. They talked about another recent podcast episode, Matt Belloni’s interview with HBO CEO Casey Bloys on The Town, where Bloys said that the thing that differentiates an HBO show is that, regardless of genre, it’s the best, most elevated version of whatever that show could be. Their implication was that all of these things that “elevate” The Last of Us — the unconventional structure, the quality of the acting and directing, the weight of the themes — make it better than more straightforward genre shows, most comparably The Walking Dead.

I see where they’re coming from, but I don’t agree. Despite its elevated ambitions and HBO pedigree, The Last of Us is not better than The Walking Dead — at least not when The Walking Dead was at its best. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead are doing almost the same thing. They’re shows about what people do to survive in extreme situations, which mostly consists of forming surrogate families and making moral compromises to protect those families. And The Walking Dead did it better.

Of course, there are caveats. Story-wise, The Last of Us and The Walking Dead are different. The Last of Us is telling a closed-ended story, while The Walking Dead is so open-ended that it’s technically still going on in spinoffs. That open-endedness — my TV Guide buddy Tim Surette described it as a procedural where the characters figure out how to survive until next week — eventually devolved into aimlessness, and The Walking Dead just kept going and going until it stopped being good. So there are seasons of The Walking Dead that are worse than The Last of Us. But those early seasons of The Walking Dead, when it was doing things that had never been seen on TV before and hitting viewers with absolute gut-punches several times a season, are better than The Last of Us has been or ever will be.

Seriously. I challenge you to go back and watch those early seasons of The Walking Dead and come back here, look me in the eye, and tell me that anything on The Last of Us hits harder than Sophia walking out of the barn — or looks better than The Walking Dead’s grainy 16mm cinematography. The Last of Us is often so dark you can’t even see what’s happening.

The Walking Dead, along with Game of Thrones, made killing off characters you thought were safe mainstream. When The Walking Dead did shock deaths, they were truly shocking. (It ended up over-relying on shock deaths to the point that it got old and the show ran out of characters people cared about, but it wouldn’t have gotten to that point if it hadn’t worked so well in the first place.) And its absolutely savage, unrelenting bleakness makes The Last of Us look soft by comparison. The Walking Dead went to darker places than The Last of Us is willing to go, and it did it over a decade ago. The only difference between Jeffrey Wright torturing a naked man on The Last of Us and similar scenes on The Walking Dead is that The Last of Us shows the man’s penis. (It’s not TV, it’s HBO.) But Wright talking about the heat-conducting properties of copper and the sickly droning score made me feel like I was watching Negan wind up to bash someone’s head in on The Walking Dead — but then it shied away from Walking Dead-style gore. The Walking Dead never would have cut away from showing someone’s hand get burnt with a frying pan. The Last of Us wants to be more subtle and less salacious, but the dialogue, staging, and characterization are very similar to The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead, however, at least has the emotional honesty to go over the top and embrace the spectacle. The Walking Dead had Rick Grimes finding out his wife died during childbirth and his son shot her in the head to keep her from reanimating, and then letting out the most soul-chilling “OH NO” of despair you’ve ever heard. It became a meme because it’s hammy out of context, but in context, it’s devastating, and Andrew Lincoln’s commitment is remarkable. Lincoln was never nominated for an Emmy for his performance, but that was because of bias against un-elevated genre shows, not quality.

(I don’t know why someone would put 4K motion smoothing on this, but they did)

There are so many things on The Last of Us that remind me of specific Walking Dead moments. Bloaters — the big mushroom guys — are like particularly gross zombies, i.e. the infamous Well Walker. Everyone on The Walking Dead has a version of Dina’s speech about the first person she killed, but it recalls Enid’s “just survive somehow” monologue in particular. And Joel’s death-by-golf-club is obviously like Negan killing Glenn and Abraham with his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat Lucille, which remains one of the most upsetting non-news things ever broadcast. I haven’t watched that scene since the first time it aired, and I don’t need to, because I can still see it. It’s burned into my brain forever. It actually went too far, and was so gruesome and cruel that it alienated people from the show forever. But, again, as sad and brutal as Joel’s death was, it was a pulled punch compared to The Walking Dead. Joel still had a face. When it was done, I said, “That’s it?” The Walking Dead crossed a line, but The Last of Us didn’t even walk up to the line. You don’t have to top The Walking Dead for barbarity, but if you’re playing the same game, you have to at least compete. I just don’t understand not pushing right up to the edge of what the audience can tolerate in a scene like Joel’s death. And they can tolerate more. Fifteen years ago, they all watched The Walking Dead.

I can imagine someone making an argument that The Last of Us is better than The Walking Dead because Joel’s death is more meaningful. It drives the whole story forward from that point, while deaths on The Walking Dead were for shock value and didn’t have lasting narrative impact. But that’s not true. Glenn’s death affected everything that happened afterward. It was the turning point for the entire second half of the show, and its ripple effect continues into the Maggie and Negan spinoff Dead City. If a mark of an elevated drama is that actions have consequences that build and escalate and build a sense of permanent, historical significance, The Walking Dead meets the criteria.

I have other issues with The Last of Us — mostly Bella Ramsey’s performance not being strong enough to carry the show the way it needs to, and the thudding obviousness of the dialogue — but those are unrelated to The Walking Dead, so I won’t get into them here. But ultimately I think The Last of Us is a bad show pretending to be a good show, and I’m heartened by the less positive audience response to Season 2 that more people are wising up to it.