The Last of Us”is Craig Mazin’s second hit in a row for HBO. Photo / Devin Oktar Yalkin, The New York Times
A few years ago, Craig Mazin was best known as a writer of mediocre comedies. But Chernobyl and now The Last of Us have transformed him into one of TV’s hottest showrunners.
Craig Mazin was ready for a change.
About a decade ago, Mazin had carved out a solid career as a comedy screenwriter. Although his credits were hardly going to win over critics — Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 as well as the second and third instalments of the Hangover trilogy among them — the calls from Hollywood executives kept coming. It was a steady and lucrative job.
Still, there was something missing.
“A lot of what I would be offered was stuff where they’re like, ‘Who can fix this thing?’” Mazin recalled in an interview late last month. “Or, ‘Can somebody get it from a C-plus to a B-minus?’”
Eventually, he decided that “I’m better than the work I’m being offered,” he said.
That was the first crucial step in what would become a remarkable midcareer ascent. Over the last four years, Mazin, 51, has spawned two hit HBO series and transformed himself from a comedy screenwriter into one of the hottest showrunners in premium scripted television.
Mazin’s latest effort, The Last of Us, HBO’s adaptation of a video game revolving around an apocalypse, was an immediate hit. The network said that the first season of the show, which premiered in January, is averaging roughly 30 million viewers, a total in line with the Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon, and easily eclipsing the second seasons of other popular series like Euphoria (19.5 million) and The White Lotus (15.5 million).
The Last of Us has also become the most successful adaptation of a video game into scripted entertainment — breaking a pitiful streak by Hollywood. While movies like Warcraft and the Sonic the Hedgehog films made plenty of money, few would consider them to be thoughtful storytelling. (Coming next month: The Super Mario Bros. Movie.)
For Mazin, it all started with that epiphany about nine years ago. At the time, he already had the respect of his peers; many of his screenwriter friends, including Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, had leaned on him for years for advice about their work. (Mazin has also been the co-host of Scriptnotes, a popular podcast that deconstructs the screenwriting process.)
“There was this enormous gap between how they saw me and how the business saw me,” he said.
He decided it was time to start listening to them and take a chance on himself, so Mazin set off to create his own project. He came upon a news article about the continued cleanup efforts at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that was the site of the 1986 disaster. Mazin knew plenty about American catastrophes but little about Chernobyl, which is in Ukraine but was at the time a part of the Soviet Union. He got to researching and was astonished by what he discovered. He devoured everything.
“The thing about Craig is, when he locks into something, he’s kind of obsessive,” said Casey Bloys, the chair of HBO and HBO Max.
Still, pitching a dramatisation of the fallout from a disaster three decades old was going to be an uphill climb. Mazin needed help. He was friendly with Carolyn Strauss, the esteemed former HBO programming executive who left the network in 2008 and began a career as a producer, with her first credit coming on Game of Thrones. Strauss knew how much Benioff and Weiss trusted Mazin professionally.
“He was a guy who they turned to for notes, for his structural mind, his story mind,” she said. “That whole crew respected his point of view on their work.”
Strauss joined the Chernobyl project as a producer and brought the idea to HBO, knowing full well that it would be a tough sell. Kary Antholis, who was then running HBO’s miniseries department, took the meeting because it was Strauss calling. And indeed, he had his doubts — both about Mazin’s unremarkable credits and the network’s willingness to invest in what was uniquely a Russian story. Then he heard Mazin’s pitch.
“It was the best pitch I’ve heard in 25 years of listening to pitches. There’s nothing that really comes close to it,” Antholis said.
Antholis convinced Sky to coproduce, lessening HBO’s financial burden. Expectations were low, and the series was given a Monday night time slot. Mazin said that he had been told repeatedly, “No one’s going to watch it.”
Instead, it was a hit with viewers and critics and a darling of the awards circuit. Chernobyl, which ran on HBO in 2019, won 10 Emmys and two Golden Globes, including the prize for best limited series from both.
This essentially gave Mazin carte blanche for whatever he wanted to do next at HBO. Mazin recalled that Bloys urged him to pursue whatever excited him most, asking, “What makes you levitate?”
Mazin was a dedicated gamer, going back to the late 1970s, when his father brought an Atari 2600 to their Staten Island, New York, home. When The Last of Us became a bestselling video game in 2013, Mazin bought a PlayStation console for it. He was mesmerised, particularly by the relationship between the two main characters: a tough middle-aged survivor named Joel and a 14-year-old girl named Ellie who is immune to the infection that turned most people on the planet into zombies.
A month after Chernobyl wrapped up its run, Mazin met with the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, and the two hit it off. They took the idea to HBO in July 2019.
“Casey, I found the thing that makes me levitate,” Mazin said he told Bloys. “Please, please, please buy this for me.”
Bloys did not play video games, and he was plenty familiar with Hollywood’s checkered history with adapting them. But there was a tradition at HBO in which writers who created a successful project were allowed to do whatever they wanted for their next one, no matter how different: Alan Ball went from Six Feet Under to True Blood; Mike White from Enlightened to The White Lotus; Michael Patrick King from Sex and the City to The Comeback.
“You’re making a bet on somebody, and it requires trust on both sides,” Bloys said. “It’s always going to be a leap of faith until you see it.”
The Last of Us was also an expensive gamble for the network, unlike Chernobyl, which had a budget of roughly US$40 million, only US$15 million of which came out of HBO’s programming budget, Antholis said.
The Last of Us was going to cost HBO more than US$150 million, not far from House of the Dragon. It also had to fill HBO’s prime Sunday night slot, bridging the gap between The White Lotus, which ended in December, and the final season of Succession, which will premiere in late March. HBO and its debt-ridden parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, desperately needed a supply of new hits to keep people from cancelling HBO Max. The stakes were high.
First, the reviews came in: Critics were ecstatic, just as they had been with Chernobyl four years earlier. And then the ratings came in: It was an enormous hit.
The third episode boosted the show’s profile even further. Social media lit up with delight over the stand-alone instalment, which was written by Mazin and mostly diverted from the source material: It centred on the marriage and survival of two peripheral characters, Bill and Frank, played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
“What struck me about Bill and Frank and the potential for that story is to show a kind of love that we just don’t give a lot of attention to: the love between committed adults that are not getting younger,” Mazin said.
The Last of Us has already been renewed, and Mazin is weeks away from starting to write scripts for Season 2 with Druckmann.
In hindsight, the chance to do any of this all began once Mazin decided he was done with being pigeonholed by Hollywood executives.
“The industry doesn’t understand who people are; it only understands what they’ve written today,” he said. “One of the traps that you can get in as a comedy writer is their insistence that you must continue to only do that, because there just aren’t that many people that they can reliably hire to do those things. So they’ll keep you there.
“It was risky,” he continued, “but also exhilarating to just say, ‘I think I’m going to allow myself the freedom to do something else.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: John Koblin
Photographs by: Devin Oktar Yalkin
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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