Melanie McFarland, Salon

If their brief lifespans are an indicator of the longevity odds of "The Last of Us," HBO's high-budget video game adaptation would seem to have a difficult if not impassable road ahead of it – and not merely due to our presumed fatigue with scripts about some impending version of Earth's big Game Over. Conversions of console-based mythologies to screens have a notoriously poor track record. In that regard, the starting line for "The Last of Us" is better positioned than, say, the challenge that the "Resident Evil" series writers faced in their effort to conjure prime rib out of the conceptual equivalent of Steak-Umms.

In creating "The Last of Us" Neil Druckmann intentionally spins a narrative as stalwart as its ferocious gameplay. The non-player character (NPC) backstories aren't simply described in their inventory notes but play out as the main characters travel through their forbidding environment. This is just one reason the PlayStation games have earned an enthusiastic fanbase since the first one came out in 2013.

Not even that is enough to guarantee a video game adaptation's success. Druckmann is also the creative mind behind the "Uncharted" franchise, which became a film; take that information as you will. "The Last of Us," however, enlists the storytelling expertise of Craig Mazin, the Emmy-winning creator of "Chernobyl." By merging the psychological profundity and emotional realism Mazin applied in his historical drama to Druckmann's speculative premise, its nine episodes feel at once harrowing and, strangely enough, hopeful....

In the second half of "Harry & Meghan" we bear witness to the couple's session with a meditation coach. Sitting side by side on a couch, they breathe deeply and take in her wisdom.

This article first appeared in Salon.

"Remember that what is transpiring in the media, what is being created is an illusion," she says. "When you try to prove that you're good and that you're not the person they say you are, you're taking the bait, you're feeding the beast. It is an illusion. Your work is not to prove your goodness. You know who you are. Both of you."...

Stewart visited the state official's office, sitting down with her on her own turf, to ask her to explain the logic behind the 2021 passage of the "Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act" (HB 1570), which bans doctors from providing puberty blockers or performing hormone therapy.

Their conversation largely consisted of Stewart attempting to wring an honest answer out of Rutledge on a single point: "Why would the state of Arkansas step in to override parents, physicians, psychiatrists, endocrinologists who have developed guidelines, why would you override those guidelines?"

The host was very specific as to which professionals he was referring, citing the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the American Association of Psychiatrists, all organizations that recommend a certain set of guidelines for children expressing gender dysphoria. Rutledge responded by claiming that for every single one of those doctors and experts, "there's an expert that says, we don't need to allow children to be able to take those medications."...

Among the factors leading to "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" becoming the talked-about dramas of their debut season, as in 2004-2005, was their novel usage of bodies and questions in their respective premieres. "Lost" opens with wide shots of bodies scattered on a beach amidst a plane crash's wreckage. "Desperate Housewives" shocks with just one, that of the omniscient narrator who dies by suicide without warning.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

Each show could have rolled along as straightforward relationship-driven dramas from there, save for the questions ending each pilot: "Oh Mary Alice, what did you do?" "Guys . . . where are we?" These simple queries establish there's something bigger going on than any individual character's story arc or their conflicts – a potential threat that supersedes individual problems....

In 2017, when Johnny Depp jokingly asked his British audience at that year's Glastonbury Festival, "When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?" then-Fox News host and eternal Donald Trump water bearer Eric Bolling lost his mind.

"Depp, you damn fool. You think you can say these things without repercussions?" he boomed in the monologue for his show "Fox News Specialists" which, if you blinked, you probably missed.

He went on to add, "Maybe Americans will show their distaste for your comments by steering clear of your movies," and advised Depp to take on a role better suited for him, about a man who "abuses drugs and alcohol to the point of being accused of abusing his beautiful young wife, played by Amber Heard. Anyway, this guy ends up a burned-out wasted fool of a man. Wait, that's not a movie role. That's your life!"...