🍿 'The Last of Us' showrunners explain their biggest canon change

Jan. 9, 2023

The Last of Us video game was deeply steeped in 2013. That's when the apocalypse begins, before the action jumps ahead 30 years to Joel and Ellie's cross-country trek.

But in HBO's The Last of Us series adaptation, the prologue is pushed to the past — 2003 to be exact. Which places the apocalyptic action squarely in present day.

“I thought it might be interesting to just say, ‘Hey, look, in this parallel universe, this is happening right now. This is happening this year,” co-showrunner Craig Mazin tells Inverse.

Read about how The Last of Us series makes changes to its adaptation and more, in today’s Inverse Daily.

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HBO
'The Last of Us' showrunners explain their biggest canon change

The Last of Us video game is deeply steeped in the year of its release. From the moment the player hits start, they become Sarah, a young girl in 2013, as she looks for her dad Joel and uncle Tommy while the zombie apocalypse starts with a bang (quite literally) outside. After the game’s prologue comes to its heart-wrenching finale, the action jumps two decades into the future with the story of Joel and wisecracking teen Ellie’s trek across a post-apocalypse America in the 2030s.

So when HBO set out to adapt The Last of Us into a live-action series 10 years later, the studio faced a dilemma. Keep the original timeline? Or more the entire plot forward by a decade? Instead, co-creators Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (the original game’s director) chose a third option: push that prologue into the past.

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Inverse Interview
'The Last of Us' star Nico Parker is HBO’s hero of the hour

Anyone who’s played The Last of Us knows Sarah Miller. She is the center of the game’s prologue, which takes up a good part of the HBO adaptation’s 80-minute premiere episode, and in a way, she’s the heart of the show entirely.

Sarah’s relationship with Joel is the driving force for The Last of Us’ zombie survival story. But does Sarah only appear in the prologue, or could we see her in later scenes of the show? Even Nico Parker, who plays Sarah in the upcoming HBO series, has no idea.

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Mind and Body
Losing weight doesn't resolve inflammation tied to weight gain, study suggests

For anyone trying to lose weight, there’s a truth we can all universally acknowledge: Numbers aren’t fun.

From the digits on a scale to the body mass index in your medical records, better health is often positioned as a numbers game. Hit the right number, and all your health problems will magically resolve, so the logic goes.

Yet increasingly, science is revealing that measures like the BMI are misleading — and that losing weight may not be a silver bullet after all. That’s the takeaway from a new paper in the journal Science that finds weight loss may come with unexpected — and not entirely desirable — health effects.

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CES 2023
Asus sidesteps VR headsets with glasses-free 3D laptops

Forget the bulky VR headsets. With Asus’ two latest laptops, you won’t need to strap on an entire headset to get a quick glance at a 3D model you’re working on.

At CES 2023, Asus announced two laptops with its Spatial Vision technology where its OLED displays can generate a glasses-free 3D image.

Asus says it plans on releasing these 3D laptops in the second quarter of 2023. While the ProArt Studiobook’s 3D capabilities are impressive, it isn’t without some stuttering and eye-tracking lag, according to some early testers.

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CANCEL CULTURE
The secret Netflix metric that got '1899' canceled could ruin TV forever

Understanding why Netflix cancels some shows and renews others can feel like trying to predict the weather from under your blanket.

A new show might climb the ranks of Netflix’s very public Top 10 rankings, stay there for weeks, and still wind up on the garbage heap.

However, there’s a secret metric Netflix doesn’t reveal that helps explain exactly why a show like 1899 got canceled — and it may prove that Netflix’s biggest critics are right about one particular issue.

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