The Last Of Us Has Me Questioning How I Prefer To Stream Shows

The biggest problem with television today is that there are only so many hours in the day. There’s a lot of really good TV out there to enjoy and even more TV that, while it might not change the world or my life personally, I’d still enjoy watching if I had the time. The problem is I frequently don’t.

My backlog of TV shows is almost as bad as my backlog of video games. The job that I have often means trying to keep up on the latest shows, which means if something gets missed, it can stay missed for a while. As such, I’m only just now sitting down to watch The Last of Us, and now I have a problem.

The Last Of Us Is Not A Show To Binge Watch

Part of the reason I intentionally held off on watching The Last of Us initially is the same reason I intentionally hold off on waiting for most shows. I hate weekly release schedules. I’ve written before about how I much prefer the streaming model that sees all episodes of a show drop at once. I might only watch a couple of hours of TV a night, and I don’t have six different shows that I try to keep up on at once. It’s much easier for me to watch a couple of hours of one show every night until it’s done.

This was how I expected to watch The Last of Us with my HBO Max subscription. Two seasons of the show are complete, with 16 total episodes. I figured I’d watch it over the course of a week and then move on to thenext thing. But I can’t.

Maybe Weekly Viewing Makes Sense After All?

For the first time that I can remember, a show I’m watching has me wishing I had watched it when it was new. Not to avoid spoilers, I already knew everything that happens from the games, but because I really could use a week break in between episodes. It’s such an emotionally harrowing show that I can’t watch one episode after another.

Some of the episodes, like the much lauded (justifiably) episode, "Long, Long Time" starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as a couple who find love during the apocalypse, are quite wonderful, and make you want to watch more. But others required a longer break.

I’m thinking of “Endure and Survive”, an episode that ends on such an emotionally draining note that I straight up didn’t watch the next episode for a couple of days. I just couldn’t handle it. I needed an emotional break from the show.

HBO Max: Plans start from $10.99 a month
If you'd like to try to binge watch The Last of Us, you can do so with an HBO Max subscription. maybe you'll have better luck than me.

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Last night I watched the end of Season 1, and despite knowing exactly how it would end, watching it happen was still powerful. Under other circumstances, I would have gone straight into the beginning of Season 2, but I just couldn’t, not that night.

Recently, I started watching Season 2 of The Pitt. I had binged the first season after it was done, but thought, as an experiment, I might try weekly viewing of the new season. While I thought the pseudo-real-time element of the show would make binge-watching a near necessity, I haven’t found that so far. It also strikes me that this is the sort of show that might also have moments so emotionally traumatic that I might need a week to recover. When Season 3 of The Last of Us comes out, I know exactly how I plan to watch it.