Reviews Series / Y The Last Man 2021

Why The Last Man?

For the past two decades, various talented individuals have been attempting to adapt the comic book series Y: The Last Man (Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, 2002-08) into live-action media, but every attempt inevitably collapsed in on itself like a Chilean mine. Yet the project traded hands year after year because many remained captivated by the concept of a world where any living creature possessing a Y chromosome suddenly died, save for one man and his capuchin monkey. Then, at last, in 2021, despite or perhaps because the world was still in the grips of a global pandemic, Y: The Last Man TV finally lit up computer monitors across the nation.

And was abruptly canceled a few weeks later.

One couldn’t think of a better time for this show to air, considering the aforenoted pandemic and the advances in gender politics and representation since the comic was first produced in the early Aughts. Nevertheless, a stark difference between potential and execution choked this project in its infancy.

The titular Last Man is Yorick Brown (played by Ben Schnetzer), a hapless, struggling escape artist who has just unsuccessfully asked his girlfriend, Beth (Juliana Canfield), to marry him. The day after Yorick’s heartbreak, every mammal in the world with a Y in their genome spontaneously hemorrhages blood and dies, all at the same time. Only Yorick and his monkey companion, Ampersand (played by … the digital artists animating him), survive whatever caused the chromocide.

In quick order, man and monkey meet up with Yorick’s mother, Jennifer Brown (Diane Lane), a congresswoman who found herself the only high-ranking government official still standing after the Event; she became the de facto commander-in-chief. At the fortified Pentagon, Yorick is given a bodyguard—a secret agent known only as “355” (Ashley Romans). They are then sent to search for Dr. Allison Mann (Diana Bang), one of just four or five surviving scientists with any chance of solving the mystery Yorick presents. The skeleton government hopes Mann can figure out whether Yorick’s immunity can be reverse-engineered.

The show follows a tri-part storyline: in one, Man, Mann, and Number set off on a road-trip through devastated America, trying to reach the scientist’s sophisticated San Francisco lab. In a second, President Brown’s other child, Hero, wanders every direction except toward the Pentagon as she uses this societal break-down to cut herself off from her disapproving mother. In the third, the Pentagonians try to wrangle any resources still operating to try to put the country back on its feet. Amazingly, not one of these sub-plots is sufficiently engaging, largely because none of the characters are sufficiently likable.

Besides a minor character named Sam and maybe Yorick’s mother, there isn’t a single character in this show that is even slightly sympathetic. They’re all awful people. Who thought that was a good idea? Sure, characters need to have flaws, but they also need to have some virtues, some basis for empathy.

Yorick Brown is totally lacking in any of the qualities that made him an engaging character in the source material; his background as the son of an English Major is nonexistent, his wit, quips, and pop-culture references are gone, and his survivor’s guilt is never even hinted at until the last episode. He is an Everyman in the most negative possible way—lacking any overtly offensive qualities, he’s simply a mold for the cismale audience members to project themselves into and invest in.

The other characters are similarly mangled in this adaptation for reasons that are hard to decipher. Dr. Mann, who was best known for being an eternal sourpuss who couldn’t stand Yorick’s immature behavior, is reimagined as a grumpy Jeff Goldblum-esque genius, who is introduced drawing penises on paintings of famous historical doctors, and who becomes the main source of comedy among the trio. One could almost find her likable but for her consistent selfish lack of judgment and an indifferent, rapid-fire delivery that feels like an assault.

355’s strict professionalism is downplayed in favor of a more openly hostile woman who, at one point, lectures Yorick on his white male privilege. Moreover, it was hard to believe her as a super-secret agent, given her refusal to work effectively with her companions, and her repetitious propensity for nearly killing herself while sleepwalking. You’d think any of that would’ve disqualified her from serving in the army, let alone a blacker-than-black ops government agency.

Yorick’s sister, Hero, is probably the worst of them all—a very self-destructive woman who accidentally kills her cheating boyfriend hours before the Event hit, she spends the entirety of the series lost in her little pity party, doing everything in her power to avoid seeing her mother even though this repeatedly puts the lives of her friends and companions in jeopardy. People who recognize that they’re monsters but only feel sorry for themselves are the worst kinds of characters because they refuse to change.

The show’s utter failure to produce any desirable characters is all the more disheartening given that the comics series this show was based on is one of the more celebrated offerings produced by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, and the story’s musings on gender identity and what it means to be a man have only become more relevant in recent years with the rise of fascistic toxic masculinity on the right and the transgender and intersex community on the left. Of note, Sam (Elliot Fletcher) is the one breakout character on the show— a trans man who is kind, funny, charming, relatable, and by far the most sympathetic person in the entire cast. If anything, he better represented Yorick’s character from the comics than Schnetzer’s Last Man.

On top of everything else, the environments are dull, the camerawork is standard, and the CGI monkey isn’t convincing at all, all of which could’ve been forgiven if the writing or characters had been engaging. The actors are clearly doing the absolute best they can, but as it stands, the show is basically taunting the audience with the idea of what could’ve been.

I kept hoping each episode would’ve introduced a better writer, one that actually understood the characters, but as the season plodded on, my hope changed to “Maybe they’ll get a better showrunner next season.” That hope also won’t be answered now that FX officially canceled the show before the last two episodes were released, which was just adding insult to injury when you think about it, but was it undeserved?

There remains a possibility that the show might get picked up by another company, but considering that they drop f-bombs and show full female nudity, it’s doubtful that any network or streaming service will be brave enough to shell out the cash for something that was canceled so quickly.

I wouldn’t recommend this series to those who have read the comics, but then again, I wouldn’t recommend this show to people who haven’t read the comics. The show’s overriding theme: wasted potential. That may not be what the creators intended, but that is certainly what I was picking up on.

In the end, all I can ask is y? Eh, why?