It’s Emmy season, and with that comes panels galore for all the major contenders up for awards next month. One of those is HBO’s “The Last of Us,” which delivered a contentious second season earlier this year but is still one of the biggest shows on TV these days and is nominated for multiple awards, including Best Drama Series.
After 90 days, the first season hit an average of around 32 million viewers per episode. Around the 45-day mark, HBO announced that the second season had hit an average of around 37 million viewers per episode and was still growing, but to date they have yet to release a comparable 90-day figure.
The series has been one of the few weekly release shows this year to have every episode in the Nielsen streaming Top 10. That said, its live overnight HBO viewership saw a distinct drop between its first and last episode in the U.S., a decision the network attributes to airing the finale on a public holiday.
Then there’s the overall public sentiment toward the second season, which has been decidedly mixed – some loving it, some losing interest, and some actively hate watching it like they do various HBO Max series (ie, “And Just Like That,” “The White Lotus”).
The third season presents an even bigger challenge in some ways, as the entire show shifts perspective – putting Kaitlyn Dever’s antagonist Abby front and center for much of its run along with introducing two new key characters and fleshing out some supporting cast from the second season. The scale of the season is also far bigger than anything seen to date.
For now, sole showrunner Craig Mazin says the aim of the third season is to build a new run around Abby and push the show even further in terms of ambition. He also teased one mystery from the second season, ‘what’s on Level B3’, will be solved:
“Knowing that I’ve got this pillar in Kaitlyn that is going to anchor this cast, and knowing that I can turn again to [production designer] Don [MacAulay] to build this physical world around us, and it is going to be quite ambitious.
We’ve had meetings already, he knows, and [VFX producer] Alex [Wang] is going to extend those beyond and there’s creature work. If you play the game, you know there’s something coming. We’ve done a lot of talk about basements, that’s all I’ll say.”
Speaking about what’s to come for her character, Dever says:
“We’re getting to the real core of Abby in this season, and really giving her some context. Because in the game, she does sort of appear, and you don’t know who she is, where she’s coming from, why she [did what she did]. I feel like we’re really getting to the core of the why, and her grief is what fuels that rage… I’m just grateful to get to continue that journey for Abby and dig even deeper to what drives her and just how broken she is. Maybe she’s not all that different from the other human beings in the show.”
Filming on the third season is expected to begin in early 2026, with an airing planned for 2027. However, it remains undecided whether the show will conclude with a long third season or shorter third and fourth seasons.
