Y oh why oh why?
Women could have stolen this show, if it weren't for its lifeless characters
A thousand different varietals could bloom from the seed of the sci-fi series Y: The Last Man.
A mysterious plague kills all people with Y chromosomes, except for one man: in an instant, cis boys and men are gone, and so are trans women. The disease, or whatever it is, doesn't spare any other mammalian species — half the world's dogs, cats, rats and whatever else die off, too. Extinction looms, but the premise itself is hyper-fertile. What values does a world run by women assign the only (cis) man left alive? And how does a society in which half the population abruptly flatlines remake itself?
The FX series isn't a particularly faithful adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Eisner Award-winning comic-book series, but there remains a perhaps immovable comic-book quality to the show. Only in a medium so proud to embrace the fantastical would “the last man” (Ben Schnetzer) happen to be the son of the new president (Diane Lane), who surely raised a few private-school eyebrows by naming her daughter (Olivia Thirlby) Hero, and who suddenly finds herself protected by a secret agent (Ashley Romans) who goes by “355.” And while the apocalypse is nigh, Schnetzer's Yorick — the potential key to explaining the “Event” and thwarting the end of humanity — gives little thought to anything else but finding his girlfriend (Juliana Canfield) and taking care of his pet capuchin monkey named Ampersand, a male that also somehow survived extinction.
Y: The Last Man debuts after several attempts to bring the story to both large and small screens. One of the biggest draws of the original comic-book series was the way it reached toward realism amid an unthinkable cataclysm. But that melding of opposites feels greatly unsatisfying in this sombre and occasionally grisly TV adaptation, which ends up emphasizing plotting and world-building in lieu of characterization. Yet the former aren't especially notable either, despite showrunner Eliza Clark's emphasis in interviews on exploring the infrastructural failures of this bare new world.
Yorick is so unconvincingly written that I would have happily watched a version of the series that centred on the D.C. drama that follows after the president, vice-president and much of the political elite perish in one fell swoop, leaving the opposition party in charge. Almost immediately, the conservative first daughter, Kimberly (a blond Amber Tamblyn), begins building momentum against Lane's Democratic senator-turned-potus Jennifer Brown — already the target of violent conspiracy theorists who believe she unleashed a biological weapon to take over the White House. There aren't enough specifics to support one Republican's accusation that the Brown administration is a “Rachel Maddow fever dream.” But Tamblyn is terrific as a widow and mother grieving the loss of three young sons, torn between her partisan-hack habits and her rediscovery of the more empathetic parts of herself she'd repressed.
There's just not enough here to distinguish Y: The Last Man from any number of post-apocalyptic entertainments we've had in previous years, other than the gratingly single-minded protagonist. A world with almost no men has so much potential, but this one is squandered on its mostly lifeless characters.