The last/worst man on Earth
With his Fox series, Will Forte has created a network TV phenomenon: an aggressively unlikable sitcom star
Nothing in The Last Man on Earth, which wrapped up its first season this past Sunday, has quite lived up to the promise of its first few episodes. Drained of any of the grim sincerity that usually comes with the end of the world, it had a kid-left-homealone anarchy that was still tinged with a noticeable melancholy. Phil Miller (Will Forte) was bowling with flaming cars, and drinking with a bar full of anthropomorphized sporting goods, and sawing a toilet hole into a backyard pool diving board, but that bushy beard and sad eyes suggested that even he could see he was pranking away the loneliness, circling a bleak drain even if those stopped working.
Things have necessarily got a little more conventional as more and more people have joined our last man, and the show has burned through more standard sitcom dynamics, with a post-apocalyptic twist: odd couple, love triangle, jealous infighting, wacky coverups, still more jealousy. There’s still plenty of melancholy humour — there’s often good comedy in throwing people into an extreme situation and keeping them just as petty, insecure and selfish as they usually are — but the show has also settled into the familiar man-boymeets-world groove, testing Phil’s immaturity against all comers.
That is, a bit, what even those early moments were offering, albeit in more unique ways: neither stealing home decor from the Smithsonian nor filling his dining room table with porn was going to fill the void, an the extremity of the situation gave it a hint of allegory. And it is still, a bit, the show’s unique lifeline, at least in the way it doesn’t just make Phil a man-boy, but a relentlessly despicable, transparently pathetic one — a shallow, scheming ass who isn’t even redeemed by at least getting his way.
Phil does things he knows are wrong with full gusto and until he has no other choices open to him. Having reluctantly married the first woman who came along — Carol (Kristen Schaal), who desperately clings to old rules and rituals — he spent most of their time together trying to find an out to sleep with the ones who followed. His schemes to bed Melissa (January Jones) have included lying about his desire to repopulate the Earth (you can’t have his and Carol’s kids having sex now, could you?) and almost aban- doning Todd (Mel Rodriguez), the schlub she later hooked up with, in the desert. He’s tried to drive other survivors away, just so he could have a guilt-free threesome. He’s also pretty much incapable of doing anything useful for survival.
His actions aren’t just wacky sitcom antics, they’re genuinely repugnant: Phil thinks with nothing but his penis, and doesn’t have a sense of empathy so much as a guilt over being called out when his dumb plans inevitably backfire. He hasn’t learned much of anything despite his constant failure, even though there’s been some genuinely touching bits of humanity directed at him, as when he and Carol divorced. It’s all incredibly refreshing.
Freeing Phil of the dull trap of likability gives the show a tension that its scenarios might not otherwise have: it’s a place of infinite possibility, not all that unlike the end of the world. Phil can show bits of humanity, which are surprising in themselves, but the question is usually in what different and horrible way Phil is going to screw himself and everyone else over: every happy outcome is alike, but every unhappy one is ridiculous in its own way. His inability to even consider, much less seek, redemption makes both his failures and his occasional successes feel cathartic.
For Forte, this an evolution of style. He’s not quite a full-on anticomedian, like some of his more abrasive peers, but he likes to find laughs in the hypocrisies and blind spots of selfish jerks. MacGruber — whether on Saturday Night Live or the underrated movie that was spun off the character — is relentlessly off-putting, from the desperately smug ways he treats his equals to grating banter with his enemies to his pathetic, wheezing dirty talk during sex.
Still, there he’s supposed to be a figure of ridicule: in Last Man, the joke is less on Phil than about and around him, stemming from his failings but not stopping at them. Plus, he’s still our central viewpoint, and we’re primed to want what he wants, even though that’s often petty and stupid. As much as anything, the jokes here stem from the fact his narrow-mindedness is so relatable, his failings so obvious and universal, his mindset so prevalent in our unconscious moment: he’s an everyman, and that turns out to be sadly ridiculous, especially when (almost) everyone else is dead.
His actions aren’t just wacky sitcom antics: they’re genuinely repugnant