Y: THE LAST MAN
Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s beloved comic book Y: The Last Man gets the television treatment
Post-apocalyptic comic book makes a timely jump to TV.
ONE OF THE MOST lauded non-superhero comic books of the early 2000s was Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Vertigo series
Y: The Last Man. In it, the world experiences a sudden event where every mammal which has a Y chromosome just dies, except for an unassuming, underachieving 20-something, Yorick Brown, and his pet capuchin monkey called Ampersand.
Equal parts thriller, gender exploration, romance and political potboiler, Y: The Last Man seemed like a cert for adaptation to film or TV. But it’s taken almost 20 years for FX’S Y: The Last Man series to finally come into being. After several development iterations and creative changes, it was playwright Eliza Clark’s take on the book that ultimately won out, starring Ben Schnetzer as Yorick, and Diane Lane playing his mother, the de facto President of the United States.
“I pitched a show that was about an apocalypse caused by a plague that targeted the Y chromosome,” Eliza Clark shares with Red Alert. “As much as I loved the book, I was deeply aware of the ways that it needed updating. Really, that’s central to my adaptation and it’s one of the main things I’m interested in. That’s what I pitched them, and what they chose, so I think they were also interested in that too.”
The series keeps to the narrative spine of the 60-issue comic series. Asked how many issues encompass season one, Clark says the first season retains a lot of the first Y compilation. “And it’s our version of it because it strays from the book in certain ways,” she adds. “As I said before, I love the book and the worlds that Brian and Pia created.
“But there’s a lot of fun that can be had exploring, in a deeper way, some of the places that they created in the book, because I’m really interested in prison abolition. I’m really interested in what a world without police would look like. And at the very beginning of the first season, there are power vacuums that are created by the death of a lot of cis men. In some ways, people just come in and fill in those gaps.”
ROMANS’ ROAD
While the book refers to Yorick in the title, there are a wide range of diverse characters with fascinating arcs that dovetail into his adventures. Clark says she wanted to take advantage of that in the series, so more points of view are included. “I truly believe that this is an ensemble show,” she says. “But I think if anyone is the protagonist, and I think this is true of the book as well, it’s really Agent 355 [Ashley Romans].” An enigmatic character from the pilot forward, 355 becomes Yorick’s protector as the plot unfolds and she challenges him and everyone around him to save what’s left of humanity via his DNA.
Clark continues, “I have always been interested in using the framework of his survival to speak to how each of these people are feeling about the world and how their understanding of the world changes. His experience of this world is unique in some ways.
“He’s the last of his kind because he has a Y chromosome, but he’s not the last man. He and [transgender man] Sam [Elliot Fletcher] are having similar and different experiences. Sam is also a visible man in this world that has to navigate situations that are occasionally dangerous, occasionally scary, or when people
are thinking that each of them is a ghost. There’s something really interesting about both of their survival, and their experiences depend on where they are in the world, and who they’re stuck with in order to survive.
“But I also think that the show is exploring the loneliness of being the only one of anything,” Clark adds. “Identity and the ways that identities intersect, it’s all from a character perspective, but we think a lot about intersectionality in our writers’ room. I think all of these characters are dealing with a sense that they are the last of their kind. What’s interesting about this show is that everybody deals with it differently. And we tried not to make any assumptions about how somebody would respond to something from a gender perspective.”
With a lot happening to all the characters in season one, Clark says she’s proud of how they set up the fall and then really dig into what’s next. “I think the groundwork, and the character work, and watching what these characters go through in the first half of the season, really earns us the fun and excitement and weird, strange stuff that is coming in the second half of the season.” TB
Y: The Last Man is on Disney+ weekly from 22 September.
At the beginning there are power vacuums created by the death of a lot of cis men