HBO and streaming service Max — led by shows Succession and The Last of Us — drew the most nominations for 2023 TCA Awards, the Television Critics Association said Friday.

HBO and Max garnered a combined 20 nominations for the TCA Awards — which spotlight exceptional performances, series, creators, and stars spanning across all genres and platforms — to lead all distributors, according to the TCA, which represents more than 200 journalists who cover television for publications across the U.S. and Canada.

FX finished second with 10 nominations, followed by Disney Plus and Peacock, with nine nods each. 

HBO’s Succession and The Last of Us earned an industry-high five nominations each, tied with FX's The Bear. ABC series Abbott Elementary and Peacock’s Poker Face tied with four nominations.

Abbott Elementary will look to repeat in the category of Outstanding Comedy series as it competes with HBO’s Barry and Max’s The Other Two, as well as FX's Reservation Dogs and What We Do In The Shadows; Peacock's Poker Face; and Apple TV Plus's Shrinking. 

In the Outstanding Drama category, Succession will also look to repeat last year's win against 2019 category winner, Better Call Saul (AMC), as well as Disney Plus’s Andor, HBO/Max's The White Lotus and The Last of Us; Paramount Plus’s The Good Fight; AMC's Interview With the Vampire and Showtime’s Yellowjackets.

 “The 2023 nominees for the TCA Awards boast an eclectic lineup from across the entertainment spectrum,” TCA President and TV Critic for Salon.com Melanie McFarland said in a statement. “This season truly had something for everyone — from innovative comedies and gripping dramas, to immersive documentaries and refreshingly cerebral storytelling set in a galaxy far, far away. I am eager to see which stars and series our members have chosen to honor when the winners are revealed.”

Winners for the 39th annual TCA Awards will be announced August 7. Below is a complete list of nominations.

Outstanding Achievement in News or Information

• 30 for 30 — ESPN
• Free Chol Soo Lee — PBS
• Frontline – PBS (eight-time winner in category)
• Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? — Netflix
• Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence — Hulu
• Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi — Hulu
• The 1619 Project — Hulu
• The U.S. and the Holocaust — PBS

Outstanding Achievement in Reality

• Couples Therapy — Showtime (2021 Winner in Category)
• Jury Duty — Amazon Freevee
• RuPaul’s Drag Race — MTV (2014 Winner in Category)
• The Rehearsal — HBO | Max
• The Traitors — Peacock
• Top Chef — Bravo
• Vanderpump Rules — Bravo
• Welcome to Wrexham — FX

Outstanding Achievement in Children’s Programming

• Alma’s Way — PBS Kids
• Bluey — Disney Plus
• Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood — PBS Kids (2016 Winner in Youth Category)
• Donkey Hodie — PBS Kids
• Eva the Owlet – Apple TV Plus
• Molly of Denali — PBS Kids (2020 Winner in Youth Category)
• Ridley Jones — Netflix
• Sesame Street — HBO | Max (2018, 2011 & 2001 Winner in Youth Category)
• Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures — Disney Junior/Disney Plus

Outstanding Achievement in Family Programming

• American Born Chinese — Disney Plus
• High School Musical: The Musical: The Series — Disney Plus
• Jane — Apple TV Plus
• Love, Victor — Hulu
• Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur — Disney Channel
• Ms. Marvel — Disney Plus
• Never Have I Ever — Netflix
• Star Trek: Prodigy — Paramount Plus
• The Mysterious Benedict Society — Disney Plus

Outstanding New Program

• Andor — Disney Plus
• Interview with the Vampire — AMC
• Jury Duty — Amazon Freevee
• Mrs. Davis — Peacock
• Poker Face — Peacock
• Shrinking — Apple TV Plus
• The Bear — FX
• The Last of Us — HBO | Max

Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries or Specials

• A Small Light — National Geographic
• Beef — Netflix
• Black Bird — Apple TV Plus
• Daisy Jones & The Six — Prime Video
• Fleishman Is in Trouble — FX
• Mrs. Davis — Peacock
• The Patient — FX
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story — The Roku Channel

Outstanding Achievement in Drama

• Andor — Disney Plus
• Better Call Saul — AMC (2019 Winner in Category)
• Interview with the Vampire — AMC
• Succession – HBO | Max (2022 & 2020 Winner in Category)
• The Good Fight — Paramount Plus 
• The Last of Us — HBO | Max
• The White Lotus — HBO | Max
• Yellowjackets — Showtime

Outstanding Achievement in Comedy

• Abbott Elementary — ABC (2022 Winner in Category)
• Barry — HBO | Max
• Poker Face — Peacock
• Reservation Dogs — FX
• Shrinking — Apple TV Plus 
• The Bear — FX
• The Other Two — HBO | Max
• What We Do in the Shadows — FX

Program of the Year

• Abbott Elementary — ABC (2022 Winner in Category)
• Andor — Disney Plus
• Better Call Saul — AMC
• Poker Face – Peacock
• Succession — HBO | Max
• The Bear — FX
• The Last of Us — HBO | Max
• The Other Two — HBO | Max
• The White Lotus — HBO | Max

Oustanding Achievement in Variety, Talk or Sketch

• The Amber Ruffin Show — Peacock
• A Black Lady Sketch Show — HBO | Max (2020 Winner in Category)
• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson – Netflix (2022 Winner in Category)
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver — HBO | Max (2021, 2019 & 2018 Winner in Category, and 2015 winner in News & Information)
• Late Night with Seth Meyers — NBC
• The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — CBS
• Saturday Night Live — NBC
• Ziwe — Showtime

This past week marked the last season 1 episode of The Last of Us, a landmark TV adaptation of a hit video game that has set viewer records for Warner Bros. Discovery’s premium cable service HBO and its streaming sibling, HBO Max. 

It’s also the last days of Major League Baseball Spring Training, where minor league hopefuls get their last chance to make the bigs before shipping back to bush league ball’s bus rides, Motel 6s and Denny’s budget entrees. 

The confluence of these two moments in entertainment got me thinking about what WBD is creating, and what kind of team will be doing it, in the years to come. Building and sustaining a deep team with a productive development pipeline is hard. 

Tearing one up, disrupting its chemistry, or starving it of resources, is easy and far too common, in both Hollywood and in baseball. 

Will The Last of Us end up being one of the last great shows we can expect from a radically slimmed down HBO/Warner Bros. team? As WBD keeps laying off talented players, will it keep finding enough big-league creative talent to take the big swings executives say they plan to keep taking? Or are we headed to a future HBO more Denny’s and Motel 6 than, say, the resorts of White Lotus? 

There’s no doubt CEO David Zaslav and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels have earned their green eyeshades and chainsaw reputations. The audacious corporate shell game that created WBD almost exactly a year ago also shouldered $55 billion of debt from AT&T, extracted Discovery from its parlous position as a cable-dominated media company, and set off a tumultuous 12 months of layoffs, sell-offs, write-offs, restructuring, shuttering and shelving.

In the next week or two, WBD will embark on another bit of ledger legerdemain, mushing together HBO Max and Discovery Plus streaming services into something reportedly, if inexplicably, to be called Max. 

Amid all that sits HBO, half a century old and long the home of a certain kind of Emmy-dominating, culture-crashing quality TV that competitors rival only sporadically. But HBO and especially HBO Max were hardly immune to WBD’s cuts. Most HBO Max originals have already been shut down, for instance, sometimes in brutal ways. 

Zaz and the Wieds may have secured a hefty tax write-off last August in mothballing the $90 million Batgirl, which they deemed unlikely to do well in theaters. Very rational, but such moves  have bruised the sensibilities of many free-agent creatives who now wonder whether they can still trust HBO/HBO Max with their next project. 

In the free-agent game, in baseball and Hollywood, money talks. Can HBO spend the money needed to lock up those big projects, and get them on the field? Can it deliver the kind of team that fans expect, especially if they have to pay $15 or $20 a month on the future Max? 

Building a team of great players/shows not only takes money and time, but good timing, as well. And given the crapshoot of show development, it typically takes a lot of projects in development at once, searching for the few all-stars that can be a hit. Development of The Last of Us is a great example. 

The original project started at developer Naughty Dog way back in 2009, led by by creative director Neil Druckmann, who wrote and co-directed. After four years of work, it debuted as an extremely cinematic and story-driven game in 2013. It was an immediate hit, winning a raft of awards and selling more than 17 million copies, spawning a sequel, animated shorts, and even, coming next week, a revamped Windows PC version.

What Druckmann and key collaborators including lead voice actors Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker created was a deeply cinematic project that worked on just about every level, with critics and fans celebrating its performances, story lines, visuals, music, and sound. 

Weirdly, for a project that had realized such movie-level ambitions, turning The Last of Us game into a hit TV series took a long time. A movie adaptation was first announced in 2014, but ended up in development purgatory for several years. 

The project got new life in 2019 after producer Craig Mazin, a fan of the game, was introduced to Druckmann. Within days, they had reshaped the project into an episodic series, and pitched it to HBO, which announced in 2020 that a TV show was coming.

Filming, at a whopping cost of $10 million to $15 million per episode, didn’t start until early 2021. And all along, various executive producers, directors and stars came and went as Druckmann and Mazin tried to assemble a winning team.

Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey and Mahershala Ali turned down the Joel role. Then Pedro Pascal, a hot property after starring in two seasons of The Mandolorian, became available, thanks to a dispensation from his bosses at Disney Plus. He chose The Last of Us role over several competing offers, in part to work with Mazin and perhaps also because of the reported $600,000 per episode payday.

HBO has the project in part because of what it has been. Both Mazin and Pascal’s co-lead Bella Ramsey come from previous HBO projects, him for making Chernobyl, her for a key role in later seasons of Game of Thrones.

Can we expect HBO and WBD to spend $15 million per episode on the next big promising project, or $600,000 on its star, or take years to develop a bunch of projects, looking for the next Last of Us among some banjo-hitting minor leaguers? Does talent such as Mazin or Ramsey stick around for the next big swing if dollars are tight, teams are leaner, and prospects for success more complicated? 

None of this is likely to manifest in the next few months. Hollywood development cycles are notoriously slow, and the pipeline still has years-old projects in it moving forward. Meanwhile, WBD executives are squeezing as much juice as they can from the glories of HBO Past. 

To start, the second Last of Us game provides “more than a season of television,” Mazin has said, built around the narrative bones from the game’s sequel and related content. Together, that material includes, as Slate put it, “a coming-of-age story, a war story, two different love triangles, a prison break, cultists, bandits, slavers, and homophobes,” plus the (SPOILER ALERT) abrupt departure of a major character. 

So, that gets HBO a couple of big programming fence posts for the next three or four years.

Same with House of Dragons, itself a spinoff of one of Game of Thrones. It should be around for a few more seasons, though other spinoffs have already been given the Red Wedding treatment. 

WBD also recently announced a deal with Embracer Group, which now controls Saul Zaentz’s long-held rights to movie versions of The Lord of the Rings books and The Hobbit. WBD announced in February that it plans to make more LOTR movies, set in the same “age” as the books, but somehow different. 

The first time around, those rights fueled six hugely popular and frequently Oscar-winning films from Peter Jackson and wife/collaborator Fran Walsh. Collectively, the films grossed $5.9 billion in theaters worldwide and goodness knows how many billions more in DVDs. 

WBD also hopes to get the Jackson/Walsh/WETA team back together to do it again. They may be available, for the right price. But they will have to find new stories in Tolkien’s books that aren’t already being told by Amazon Prime Video, which has its own hugely successful TV series, last year’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, set in a previous age of Tolkien’s world. 

Rings of Power ended up as the most expensive TV series ever, which shows what a rich owner can do for your team. It also became the most-watched show on Amazon. 

We’ll soon see what results from the WBD deal. In baseball terms, will it be like the difference between Steven A. Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire who bought the Mets versus, say, the penurious Pittsburgh Pirates owner, Robert “Bottom-Line Bob” Nutting?

There are reasons for continued skepticism of WBD’s IP-recycling strategy. DC may have new leadership that definitively walked away from previous stars such as Superman’s Henry Cavill. But the Shazam sequel that debuted last weekend (admittedly a leftover from the previous regime) was getting a lukewarm critical response (53% on Rotten Tomatoes), and a decent-but-not-great audience reaction (87%).

Of course, hand-wringing about future HBO may soon be entirely beside the point. About a year from now, the deal-making restrictions in the Reverse Morris trust that created Warner Bros. Discovery will expire.

At that point, in what likely will be a very different media landscape than even right now, Zaslav, Wiedenfels, and the WBD board will get a chance to just get out, selling to Comcast perhaps or maybe private equity will take a swing at some rollup of late-stage media companies, just in time for more reorganizations, restructuring, and platform milking. Batter up!

The season one finale of HBO’s The Last of Us drew 8.2 million viewers on Sunday, climbing to a new high for premiere-night viewing.

The numbers, for the drama’s ninth episode, include Nielsen totals for linear HBO and first-party data for streaming on HBO Max.

The Last of Us finale appeared opposite ABC's Oscars telecast, which drew 18.7 million viewers, per Nielsen.

The premiere of The Last of Us in January drew 4.7 million viewers and the audience has steadily risen. (The fifth episode premiered on a Friday to avoid a conflict with Super Bowl LVII. By that Sunday it had been seen by 11.6 million viewers.)

The first six episodes of the series are now averaging 30.4 million viewers, including delayed viewing on video-on-demand or streaming. The first episode is approaching 40 million viewers, HBO said.

HBO said The Last of Us is HBO Max’s most-watched show in both Europe and Latin America.

As a comparison, more than 9 million people tuned into the last episode of House of the Dragon, the prequel to HBO’s Game of Thrones. The Game of Thrones finale in 2019 drew 19.3 million viewers. ■

As if we needed more evidence that HBO has stumbled into a hit with zombie apocalypse series The Last of Us, Nielsen's latest weekly ranker shows that comparing first full weeks, the series January debut significantly outperformed the August premiere of Game of Thrones spinoff series House of the Dragon. 

The Last of Us premiered January 15, and for the week of Jan. 16 - 22, Nielsen said the show garnered 847 million streaming minutes in the U.S. 

Premiering with a ton of more hype and viewer awareness back on August 21, House of the Dragon drew 741 million U.S. streaming minutes from August 22-28, Nielsen said. (Hat tip to Vulture's Josef Adalian for first noticing this and tweeting it out Thursday night.)

The Last of Us has been progressively building its audience since its debut, delivering a same-day cross-platform viewership of 7.5 million watchers for its fourth episode back on Feb. 5. That represented 60% audience growth from that impressive debut episode. 

The Sony Pictures TV series, which stars Pedro Pascal sans his Madalorian armor, has already been renewed for a second season. 

We could go on and on, filling this short audience ratings story with useless logline information that you probably already know, don't care about and can get by visiting many other places on the internet. We're better than that. And you deserve better. So we're going to end it right here. 

The many charms of Better Call Saul aside, zombie series The Walking Dead carried AMC Networks through a creatively post-apocalyptic decade. 

Even after it jumped the shark in season 6, when the bat-wielding Negan (actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was brought to heel, an entire publicly traded entertainment company was able get by quarter to quarter, largely fueled by inexplicable viewer loyalty to its grim flagship series and associated spinoffs. 

Maybe David Zaslav and the rest of his creatively antagonistic executive team at Warner Bros Discovery will be so blessed with their new zombie show. 

It sure looks like things are going in the right direction. 

On Sunday, HBO's the Last of Us was seen by a same-day audience of 7.5 million viewers across linear and HBO Max streaming viewing, according to data released by Nielsen. That represents 60% growth over the show's impressive debut four weeks earlier. 

The Last Us has grown its audience in each subsequent airing since that Jan. 15 debut.

Also read: For Sony, the Success of ‘The Last of Us’ Won’t Be the Last of Its Cross-Platform, Arms Dealer Strategy

And it came despite the fact that The Last of Us, a Sony production based on the company's popular PlayStation videogame, had episode 4 drop at the same time as the live airing of The Grammys.

Notably, based on that 7.5 million viewer total -- and the current growth trajectory -- it isn't hard to imagine The Last of Us, er, mushrooming to House of the Dragon-like viewership levels. Back in October, HBO's Game of Thrones spinoff show closed its first season with same-day cross-platform viewership of 9.3 million. 

The Last of Us regularly drops on Sunday at 9 p.m. EST, but HBO will debut episode 5 on Friday this week to get out of the way of the Super Bowl. 

That didn’t take long. HBO renewed The Last of Us, a drama series based on a celebrated pair of video games, for a second season just two episodes into the first season. Of course, the numbers were compelling, even for parsimonious Warner Bros. Discovery: 5.7 million viewers tuned in on HBO or HBO Max for Ep. 2, up 22% from a debut that was the service’s second-best since 2010. 

More broadly, the success of The Last of Us signals a couple of bigger strategies that all of Hollywood will be watching closely: the increasing viability of video games as IP resource, and arms dealer as survival strategy. Was Sony’s approach on both right all along, at least in this fast-evolving new era of streaming video? 

Yes, The Last of Us creators, led by executive producers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman, deserve a lot of credit for making a taut, compelling tale about survival and hope in a horrific, globe-girdling pandemic. 

Mazin knows plenty about post-apocalyptic settings, having created 2019’s claustrophobic and bone-chilling limited series Chernobyl, dramatizing the 1986 nuclear disaster that continues to haunt Central Europe. The show won 10 Emmys, including one of the big ones, best limited series. 

Druckman, by contrast, knows a bunch about video games as co-president of Naughty Dog, one of his industry’s most consistently successful development studios. Along the way, Druckman has co-written a long string of hit titles, including the disquieting world of The Last of Us, set in a time where a version of the Cordyceps fungus that turns ants into zombies starts affecting humans, leading to a collapse of civilization. The original scooped up boatloads of “game of the year” awards in 2014, and spawned a successful sequel, now to be the basis for the TV series’ second season. The two games have sold more than 37 million copies. 

Sony bought Naughty Dog way back in 2001, and has counted on the Santa Monica-based studio as a major supplier of PlayStation games since. More recently, Sony finally began leaning on Naughty Dog as a creator of potential hit TV shows and movies, leaning into a promise it first made back in the 1990s after buying Columbia Pictures and then launching the original PlayStation. 

That cross-platform strategy paid off last February with the release of a theatrical feature based on another Naughty Dog franchise, Uncharted, which has yielded four major games since 2007 that also have sold millions of copies. 

Uncharted’s movie version, starring Tom Holland as treasure-hunting adventurer Nathan Drake, generated $401 million in worldwide grosses, at a time when many people still weren’t going to theaters. Holland was already on a hot streak, coming off the lead role in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home and its $1.9 billion in worldwide gross, but it cemented his newfound status as a box-office hero. 

Uncharted marked new territory for Holland, Naughty Dog and Sony. Unlike the Spider-Man franchise, Uncharted is home grown. Sony doesn’t need to coordinate with Disney’s increasingly arcane Marvel Cinematic Universe canon, nor pay the Mouse House a share of the profits.  

Now comes The Last of Us, which likely won’t be the last of the home-grown home runs that Sony can harvest from its 20 first-party development studios in Japan, Europe and especially North America. With that opportunity comes the sneaking suspicion that video-game adaptations don’t have to suck, and may be more common going forward, with more common chances of success. 

Hollywood has been turning video games into films for years, perhaps no more notoriously than by Uwe Boll, the pugnacious German producer-director behind a dozen or so cinematic game adaptations -- including House of the Dead, BloodRayne (and its sequel!), and Alone in the Dark -- that collectively earned him a “worst career achievement award” in 2009 from the Razzies. That is bad.  

But the cross-pollination between games and Hollywood has been improving for years, in both directions. Cinematic cut scenes in video games have long relied on film’s visual vocabulary, even inserting visual effects such as lens flare to add to the verite’. 

Now it’s going the opposite direction too. Writer/director Paul Schrader noted briefly on his Facebook page earlier this month that “multitasking, video games and digital filmmaking have changed the language of cinema.” 

The notoriously grumpy Schrader may not have intended his observation as a compliment, but he’s right to note that a $184 billion game industry is also affecting adjacent creative pursuits such as video (think virtual production, Unreal Engine and The Mandalorian, for instance).

Certainly, Netflix is betting on the opportunity, launching a games division not even two years ago to help drive fan engagement with mobile titles based on some of its biggest streaming franchises. Now, the company wants to hire a game director for “a brand-new AAA PC title.” It’s a big step beyond quickie mobile titles into more ambitious and expensive projects, like The Last of Us and Uncharted.

Sony’s studios are as rich a potential source of intellectual property as the books, podcasts and rebooted old shows that fill out everyone else’s feature and series slates. It’s a promise Sony has floated since at least 1994, when it released the first PlayStation, and five years after it bought Columbia Pictures. 

And Sony appears poised to take advantage of the other part of its recent strategy, eschewing the loss-making transformation into a streaming-video company for its library of features and TV series. Instead, Sony has quickly become a foremost practitioner of the arms dealer strategy, selling its projects to just about any platform with the cash to outbid others. 

We’ll find out how well Sony’s strategy is paying off when the company reports its quarterly earnings on Thursday. But the company is already signaling confidence, filing on Jan. 10 plans to repurchase about 1.1 million shares of stock for about $88 million. 

That’s not a big buyback, even compared to the production budget of the next Spider-Man, but  if you’re losing billions of dollars from streaming like most of the rest of the Hollywood media companies, a share buyback of any size is the last thing you announce. 

Confidence in Sony’s approach is reflected in the company’s stock price too. While it’s down about a fourth from last January’s peak, at $90 a share on the NYSE this weekend, it’s still up about 30% since the pandemic first hit, and remains well above prices going back to 2018. Not many competitors can say that these days. 

But Wall Street pressure is growing on all of Hollywood’s media companies to stop losing money from streaming by this time next year. As some of the also-rans in the streaming wars look at their bottom lines, and Sony’s, it’s likely that while Sony may have been the first of the arms dealers, it almost certainly won’t be the last of us.  

It didn’t take long for HBO to renew its latest hit drama series The Last of Us, greenlighting a second season two weeks after the show’s debut.

The series, based on a video game of the same name that follows apocalypse survivors trying to escape a brutal quarantine zone, averaged 5.7 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max for its second episode this past Sunday, a 22% increase over its week one viewership, according to the network. 

The series, which stars Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Gabriel Luna, Anna Torv and Nico Parker, is executive produced by Craig Mazin, Neil Druckman, Carolyn Strauss, Evan Wells, Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan and Rose Lam.

“Craig and Neil, alongside EP Carolyn Strauss, and the rest of our phenomenal cast and crew, have defined a genre with their masterful debut season of The Last of Us,” Francesca Orsi, executive VP, HBO Programming and head of HBO Drama Series and Films, said in a statement. “After pulling off this unforgettable first season, I can't wait to watch this team outshine themselves again with season two.” ■

HBO's post-apocalyptic-themed, videogame-adapted series The Last of Us drew 4.7 million viewers for its premiere across linear and streaming channels Sunday, making it HBO's second biggest debut of the HBO Max era, trailing only the 10 million premiere-night viewers drawn by House of the Dragon last August.

In fact, The Last of Us drew the second biggest debut audience for HBO since the dawn of Boardwalk Empire way back in 2010.

HBO said that premiere night performance typically accounts for 20% - 40% of an episode's total audience.

Adapted from a popular PlayStation game, The Last of Us follows a group of viral, er, fungal pandemic survivors trying to make their way across post-apocalyptic America. The series scored an impressive 99% critics review aggregation score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The series was created by Craig Mazin (who previously created HBO’s Emmy-winning Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann, who created the game source material. 

Now, time for some boring press release quotes that won't improve your reader experience one iota.

“We are thrilled to see fans of the series and game alike experience this iconic story in a new way, and we extend our gratitude to them for helping to make it a success,” said Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO, HBO & HBO Max Content. “Congratulations to Craig, Neil and the brilliant cast and crew who worked tirelessly to bring this show to life. We look forward to fans around the world enjoying the rest of the season.” ▪️

The Last of Us, a drama based on the PlayStation video game, debuts on HBO Sunday, January 15. There are nine episodes.

The series takes place 20 years after civilization has been destroyed. Joel, a survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. “What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal and heartbreaking journey as they both must traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival,” according to HBO.

Pedro Pascal portrays Joel and Bella Ramsey is Ellie. Gabriel Luna, Anna Torv, Nico Parker and Murray Bartlett are also in the cast.

A New York Times review said, “That fear is the core of The Last of Us. It’s an extended horror story of single parenting. Joel’s struggle is a heightened version of the everyday experience of how being responsible for a vulnerable life makes you vulnerable yourself, how it can make you do unforgivable things for them — or to them — in the name of protection.

“Through Joel, we feel the heartbreak of this world. Through Ellie, we see its wonder. When they come across the wreckage of a jetliner, she asks if he ever flew in one, and he recalls what an uncomfortable ordeal air travel was. ‘Dude,’ she says, ‘you got to go up in the sky.’”

Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are writers and executive producers. The series is a co-production with Sony Pictures Television and is also executive produced by Carolyn Strauss, Evan Wells, Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan and Rose Lam. Production companies are PlayStation Productions, Word Games, The Mighty Mint and Naughty Dog. ■

HBO Max announced a new brand spot highlighting new shows that will launch in 2023, a year when the Warner Bros. Discovery streaming service is expected to rebrand.

Warner Bros. Discovery said it plans to combine its direct-to-consumer streaming services HBO Max and Discovery Plus in the spring.

The company is looking into names for the combined service. Reportedly, the name “Max” is a frontrunner, being vetted by company lawyers. Sub-brands including HBO Max, Discovery, D.C. and Warner Bros. will have buttons on the new service's user interface.

Until that happens, HBO Max still needs to add subscribers. The streaming service has returned to the Amazon Prime Video Channels store, and a new brand spot will be up and running.

The spot highlights a lineup of new shows coming to HBO Max in 2023 including The Last of Us, White House Plumbers, True Detectives: Night Country Rain Dogs, Velma, Love & Death and Full Circle.

It also touts returning shows such as Succession, Perry Mason, The Gilded Age, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Barry, Somebody Somewhere, The Righteous Gemstones, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Hacks, And Just LIke That. . ., Our Flag Means Death, July and The Other Two.

The spot notes that all of these shows are "All in one place."

Deep in debt, Warner Bros. Discovery has been removing shows from HBO Max in order to reduce expenses and generate revenue by licensing them to other platforms.

The shows leaving HBO Max include Westworld, season 1 of The Nevers, seasons 1 and 2 of Raised by Wolves, seasons 1 and 2 of FBoy Island, seasons 1, 2 and 3 of Legendary, season 1 of Finding Magic Mike, season 1 of Head of the Class, and season 1 of The Time Traveler’s Wife. ■

HBO has given a series order to drama The Last of Us, based on the popular PlayStation video game. The story takes place 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed. Joel, a survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes “a brutal, heartbreaking journey,” said HBO, as they traverse the U.S. 

Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann and Carolyn Strauss are executive producers, along with Naughty Dog’s Evan Wells and PlayStation Productions’ Asad Qizilbash and Carter Swan.

“Craig and Neil are visionaries in a league of their own,” said Francesca Orsi, executive VP, HBO Programming. “With them at the helm alongside the incomparable Carolyn Strauss, this series is sure to resonate with both die-hard fans of The Last of Us games and newcomers to this genre-defining saga. We’re delighted to partner with Naughty Dog, Word Games, Sony and PlayStation to adapt this epic, powerfully immersive story.”

Related: HBO to Serve Up More 'In Treatment'

Written by Mazin and Druckmann, the series is a co-production with Sony Pictures Television. PlayStation Productions, Word Games and Naughty Dog produce. 

“We’re thrilled to be working with HBO and this fantastic creative team to bring The Last of Us series to life,” said Jeff Frost, president of Sony Pictures Television Studios and Asad Qizilbash, head of PlayStation Productions. “PlayStation’s innovative storytelling and ingenuity is a natural complement to SPT’s creative focus. Our collaboration is a great example of our ‘One Sony’ philosophy at work. We look forward to developing even more iconic game IP in the future.”

With networks turning over every bit of popular intellectual property to see what might work on television, video games are an increasingly hot source for development. Most recently: Amazon Studios has licensed the rights to Fallout, with Kilter Films, producer of HBO’s Westworld, producing.

Fallout is set in the future, following a global nuclear war. Amazon Studios would not comment on its plans, but Albert Cheng, chief operating officer and co-head of television, said in a statement the game is “an iconic global franchise” with loads of fans and lively storylines.

Amazon’s Fallout plot comes on the heels of HBO’s plans to adapt The Last of Us. The PlayStation game looks at a smuggler escorting a teen girl across a post-apocalyptic U.S. Craig Mazin, who created Chernobyl, will executive produce alongside Neil Druckmann, creative director of the game.

Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions are producing. Chris Parnell, co-president of Sony Pictures Television Studios, called it “the first of many shows we intend to develop with our friends at PlayStation Productions.”

Showtime, for its part, has long been working on a series based on the Xbox game Halo. It will depict the 26th-century conflict between humankind and an alien threat known as the Covenant. Showtime would not comment, but has said the project “will weave deeply drawn personal stories with action, adventure and a richly imagined vision of the future.”

Halo is scheduled to debut next year. Pablo Schreiber, Natascha McElhone and Bokeem Woodbine are in the cast.

The TV projects bring an automatic audience along for the ride. Nearly two-thirds of American adults played video games daily in 2019, according to the Entertainment Software Association, and one has to believe the number is going up considerably in work-from-home 2020.

“Previously subcultured gaming has bled into mainstream culture,” said Sarah Unger, senior VP of cultural insights and strategy at Civic Entertainment Group. “It extends across all demographics.”