I’m surprised by the choice to include specific interactions and lines from the game, sometimes verbatim, into a story that varies quite a bit (in the details, anyway) from the game.
I don’t know how it feels to people who didn’t play the game, but I think (after just one episode, granted) that it’d work better for me if it either went its own way or if it faithfully reproduced the story from game.
Pedro Pascal’s performance in Prospect primed me to like him in this role (accidental alliteration alert), and I do, so far. But the vibe of the show is actually quite different from the game, and he is a bit of a different kind of Joel.
I think it’s tough adapting such a cinematic game into a TV show. It’s more like doing a reboot of a classic movie than doing a more traditional cross-medium adaptation (e.g., novel to film).
John Siracusa
Jason