Despite the game topping critics’ lists and winning around 320 Game of the Year awards, including the top honor of The Game Awards itself in 2020, the backlash to “The Last of Us Part II” was severe.
From death threats to online vitriol to review bombing, it brought out the ugliest side of the gaming community at the time of release. Some of that has eased, as reflected in the game’s recent release on Steam to very positive reviews, but it’s certainly far from gone.
Going into the show’s second season, many were wondering if a similar reaction would take place with the HBO TV series. While there definitely has been an expected backlash to what is a very divisive story by its nature, it has been relatively tame compared to the game.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SEASON 2
Showrunner Craig Mazin, speaking with Collider recently, has discussed the public reaction to the new season so far and how TV audiences have been far kinder than game audiences:
“The bigger surprise to me, particularly in light of the way the game had been received, was how accepting the audience was for the show. They understood, ‘Oh, my God, no! Somebody that we loved is dead. What will happen now?’
It was not, “Let’s go stand in front of HBO and throw eggs or blame Kaitlyn Dever.” No. People reacted like a normal audience would theoretically react.
There are people who are angry at the video game who will stay angry forever, and they will be angry at the show. If Neil hands out free money, they’ll be angry about denominations that the cash was in.
It was amazing, actually, to see how many people were like, ‘I hate Abby. Kaitlyn Dever should win an Emmy.’ They understood what that’s about, and that was actually quite encouraging.”
The biggest question of all though is how much impact what happened in the series will have on viewership. That’s still a bit too early to tell, but proper figures are now starting to come out.
Going by Nielsen’s Live + Same Day of U.S. linear viewers only, the lowest-rated episode was the second one – not surprising considering it was the Easter holiday that weekend. Episode 3 grew, Episode 4 grew from that and was the second highest of the season behind only the premiere. Episode 5 slipped down a bit, but Episode 6 grew again.
That Live + Same Day linear number for the six episodes so far are 938k (938,000), 643k, 768k, 774k, 652k and 701k. In comparison the first season Live + Same Day numbers were 588k, 633k, 747k, 991k, 382k, 841k, 1083k, 1039k and 1040k.
Overnights of course are only a tiny fraction of the audience for shows as they effectively only include U.S. viewership watching the series live through TVs. HBO already indicated the actual Live + Same Day audience when streaming and linear are combined it came in at around 5.3 million for the second season premiere episode – (up from 4.7m for the S1 premiere but down from 8.2m for the S1 finale).
On Nielsen’s streaming charts, only the first two full weeks of data are available so far for this season in terms of minutes watched. Season 1 pulled in 837 million and 877 million minutes in its first two weeks respectively (with that first season featuring a supersized 82-minute premiere). Season 2 pulled in 805 million and 937 million minutes in its first two weeks respectively – coming in fifth and third on the Nielsen charts for the two weeks thus far.
IMDb audience scores have been all over the place. The series dropped to a low for the episode featuring an LGBTQ romance, no different to what happened last year with the show’s third and seventh episodes, but has since recovered with Episode 2 (9.4/10) and 6 (8.8/10) being the top ranked of the season.
The season finale airs this coming Sunday, but the Memorial Day weekend holiday, along with the episode already leaking online the other day, is expected to drive numbers down.
