Greg Mason joins us today, co-creator, executive producer and showrunner of The Last

of us, as you know, currently airing on HBO.

Craig, it's great to have you with us.

Thanks so much for the time. My pleasure. Great to be here.

It's already as we know one of the best pilots HBO's ever had. I guess I'm

wondering how you're absorbing all of that and how much you sort of suspected this reaction would be in

place given sort of the built-in audience of that source material? Well certainly

the built-in audience for the source material was encouraging and everybody wants that sort of head start but I think anybody that expects this level of success is a little off kilter.

I mean I'm not I I always brace for the worst. All

I really want is for people to watch it and enjoy it but the response from critics and from the audience has been overwhelming so far.

It's just been great and I honestly feel like we haven't even shown people the best of what we have yet.

Yeah, we can't wait. Let's talk a bit about that in a second.

I am curious though going back to the origin of how you came to know the initial product and then of course

Neil Druckman and your interest in that and how you wrestled with

sort of games as source material people argue it's had a spotty record in the past.

Was there a feeling that this was a challenge to show them how it's done, so to speak?

Well, that's a really interesting question.

I never thought of it as a challenge because I had the last of us. It's a game that I played

when it came out in 2013 and you know I played it many times since on the PlayStation 3, 4, and now 5.

And I was also working with Neil Druckman.

So I had this incredible head start.

The fact that the Last of Us has such a strong narrative with such an incredible relationship at the heart of it made it very adaptable to me.

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