Can’t Wait for The Last of Us S2? Watch This HBO Show with 97% Tomatometer Based on Real Tragedy
Before The Last of Us, Craig Mazin made another HBO hit.
The Last of Us created by Craig Mazin, is one of the main HBO projects right now. Despite high ratings for the first season, it's too early to tell if The Last of Us will live up to expectations – the main action will unfold in the second season, which will be released in 2025.
Viewers unfamiliar with the source material will likely remember John Hillcoat's The Road and Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, two of the main sources of inspiration for the video game's creators. However, the series not only resembles post-apocalyptic road movies, but also Chernobyl, Craig Mazin's previous project.
It's easy to draw parallels between the opening scene of The Last of Us, in which a scientist explains that humanity is facing the threat of a cordyceps fungus pandemic due to possible global warming, and the miniseries, in which a problem-ignoring bureaucratic system tries to correct its own mistakes.
What is Chernobyl About?
On April 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, releasing a huge amount of radioactive material into the environment.
Soviet physicists Valery Legasov, Ulana Khomyuk, and the Council of Ministers' deputy chairman, Boris Shcherbina, go to the site of the accident to eliminate or at least minimize the consequences of the disaster at all costs.
Chernobyl Depicts a Global Catastrophe with Documentary Accuracy
To make Chernobyl, which has a 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics and a 97% approval rating from viewers, Craig Mazin studied tons of documents, photographs, reports, interviews and footage from the era to create a five-hour series that doesn't answer all the questions.
But it makes the viewer feel all the horror and helplessness of people who, for the first time in history, were faced with an accident that could kill millions of people and change the state of our planet forever.
The merit of Chernobyl is not only that it tries to show the tragedy realistically and talk about its consequences. The series shows us the accident as if it happened yesterday. The awareness of how the whole world was hanging by a thread makes us grateful to the people who did not let this thread break, and makes us want to know more about the disaster, which is not talked about enough today.