TV eye: wandering heroes

When the final episode of The Last of Us aired I felt conflicted, unsure of what I’d just watched. While I sort of agreed with critics who’d described Craig Mazlin and Neil Druckmann’s post-apocalyptic drama as “the best video-game adaptation ever” I also wondered whether that wasn’t damning it with faint praise. What was it up against? B-movie pulp-horror reworkings of Resident Evil (2002-)? Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019)? A low bar. Also, what most of them really seemed to be saying in their numerous essays of praise was that The Last of Us was, in fact, a faithful adaptation of one of the best video games ever.

For so much of what Mazlin achieved in this nine-part series was there in the original 2013 game, directed by Druckmann and Bruce Straley. I don’t think I fully understood that until I listened to the writer Joel Morris and the actor Melanie Gutteridge discuss their love of the game on the Comfort Blanket podcast. They reminded me that so many of the TV show’s emotional elements, beyond the main story of a haunted, broken man, Joel (Pedro Pascal), transporting a feisty teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), across a zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic US, were already present in the game: from the complex nature of its characters to the overriding mood of melancholy and loss; even the show’s morally uncertain final sequence.

What the TV show lacked, however, was the game’s sense of emotional complicity, something Morris and Gutteridge compared to immersive theatre. There, you are asked, controls in hand, to participate in characters’ complex choices and make moral decisions you might feel conflicted about, like when to employ violence, share your resources or collaborate with those who seek to do you harm.

One element the show did retain was Druckmann’s original maxim, “simple game, complex characters”. The 2013 game was structured along a basic quest narrative whereby Ellie, who is resistant to the zombie fungus, must be ferried by Joel to a rebel base where she might help in the development of a vaccine. Yet, in retaining that rudimentary structure, necessary for a third-person action-adventure computer game because of the nature of the gameplay, Mazlin and Druckmann held on to the least revolutionary aspect of The Last of Us, one that allies it with a fascinating subgenre of US television, which TV critic David P. Pierson calls the “wanderer-hero” narrative.

These shows, which began with The Fugitive (1963-67), were based around a white, male protagonist travelling across America, fleeing in pursuit or on a quest, who discovers that many of the signifiers of American order and conformity are turned against him. The show, devised by the hugely influential production/writing team of Roy Huggins and Quinn Martin, starred David Janssen as Dr Richard Kimble, a man falsely accused of his wife’s murder, who has set off in pursuit of a one-armed man he believes is the real killer, doggedly tracked by Barry Morse’s cop Lt Philip Gerard. In his 2011 book The Fugitive (TV Milestones Series), Pierson argues that the series can be read as reflecting an erosion of public confidence in American institutions such as government and the law following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a show about the individual versus the institution “where Kimble repeatedly befriends and assists [the] disadvantaged in order to protect their civil liberties.”

The Fugitive quickly spawned a host of imitators, such as The Loner (1965-66), Run Buddy Run (1966-67), Run for Your Life (1965-68) and The Incredible Hulk (1977-82). Quinn Martin repeated the formula himself with The Invaders (1967-68) and Coronet Blue (1967). Both were far more nihilistic renderings of The Fugitive’s template, infused with desperation, paranoia, alienation and far more distrust of the average middle-class white American.

In The Invaders, Roy Thinnes played architect David Vincent, who learns that aliens disguised as humans are attempting to take over the world and must warn an unbelieving populace. Coronet Blue starred the square-jawed Frank Converse as Michael Alden, who believes he is an innocent marked for death. The Invaders ended suddenly after two seasons, the aliens undefeated, while Coronet Blue was cancelled before it could be revealed that Alden was a Russian spy trained to appear like an American, targeted because he tried to defect.

It’s easy to see The Last of Us as the 21st-century’s post-apocalyptic redux of such shows, with public institutions so eroded as to be non-existent and paranoid distrust becoming a life-saving reality. Yet, in The Last of Us, it ’s the replication of a 60-year-old model of TV storytelling that I find so interesting.

Structurally, these shows were perfect repetitive examples of US network TV, in which the protagonist faced the same goal every week, each individual episode working as a standalone adventure that could be watched and enjoyed without reference to the previous week ’s exploits. But emotionally and thematically they contain a deep sense of existential dread, the reprise of the weekly formula only adding to their mood of interminable entrapment. No one holds them up as great examples of TV storytelling any more but there is something profoundly melancholy in that repetition, in their need to start again every week, their heroes no closer to resolution. Without giving anything away, but quietly pointing out that it has been commissioned for a second series, the end of season one of The Last of Us felt similarly bleak. Not just because of the painful decisions made by its characters but because Joel and Ellie have been denied narrative resolution and, like Richard Kimble, Michael Alden, David Vincent and Bill Bixby’s David Banner before them, must now continue on in the existential TV purgatory of an ancient narrative formula.