HBO's The Last of Us season two will only be seven episodes long

engadget.com:

Somehow, it's already been almost a year and a half since the first season of The Last of Us arrived on HBO. Things are well underway with the second season, and we've known for a while that it won't premiere until 2025. We still don't know exactly when to expect it (though given that they're well into shooting, an early-year debut isn't out of the question), but we do now know that season two will only have seven episodes.

In an extensive interview with Deadline, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (director of the two The Last of Us games that Naughty Dog has released for various PlayStation consoles) confirmed the shorter season. «The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons,” Mazin said to Deadline. “When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season, the national breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.”

That said, Mazin said that season three will likely be „significantly larger“ — we don't know if that's from a scope perspective or running time perspective, but it's an interesting thing to broadcast given that we're still six months minimum away from season two premiering. And Deadline also confirmed that season two will have at least one extra-long episode, much like the 90-minute series premiere and the 70-plus minute episode focused on Bill and Frank in season one.

We've known for a while that Mazin and Druckmann were going to spread The Last of Us Part II over multiple seasons, but it even sounds like the story could spin into a forth season. „We feel like it’s almost assuredly going to be the case that — as long as people keep watching and we can keep making more television — Season 3 will be significantly larger. And indeed, the story may require Season 4,“ Mazin said.

While the plotting of The Last of Us Part II was fairly