Hulu’s ‘Y’: a good man is hard to find
Looks like it’s just us girls. Based on a popular comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, “Y: The Last Man” offers a dystopian tale of catastrophe and survival, one that’s not afraid to project a weird sense of humor. “Y” streams on FX on Hulu beginning today.
Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzer) is the last man left alive. But he’s hardly alone. For starters, he’s got his Capuchin monkey (the kind Ross had on “Friends”) — and a planet filled with shocked and grieving women. In this gruesome tale, a sudden plague kills every mammal with a Y chromosome. That’s us, guys. But it somehow spares Yorick, named, one supposes, for the skull Hamlet contemplates in a graveyard scene. “Poor Yorick, I knew him well …” But I digress.
And how well do we know Yorick? The opening episode contemplates life just before the “event.” Yorick is a floundering wouldbe magician. Not even his adolescent student respects him, and his girlfriend can’t take his proposal of marriage seriously because he can’t pay his rent without help from his parents, who include powerful Congresswoman Jennifer Brown (Diane Lane), who has just picked a very public fight with the president. Yorick’s sister, Hero Brown (Olivia Thirlby), is also a mess. She’s a heavy drinker, and that’s a problem when you’re an EMT and drive an ambulance for a living. She’s also carrying on an affair with a fellow EMT who is just about to tell his wife that it’s over. Or so she believes. Rep. Brown’s wayward children don’t help her cause in Washington’s gossipy corridors.
For all of the gore to come, “Y” takes a sly and playful look at gender roles. In an early scene, the president’s unctuous daughter is seen plugging a book about “cancel culture” and boys’ self-confidence, complaining to a talk-show audience that PC culture doesn’t allow boys to be boys. Little does she know.
There’s a backstory about Agent 355 (Ashley Romans), who becomes Yorick’s bodyguard. First seen dispatching a local terrorist in Oklahoma, she’s sent by her superiors to Washington to be on the president’s security detail. Is she linked to the outbreak?
And why is Yorick, our floundering Houdini wannabe, the only human male to survive?
Despite its subject, “Y” doesn’t dwell on blood and guts, and avoids the suffocating morbidity of “The Walking Dead.” Neither does it shy away from its comic book origins. Scenes are often framed to evoke the graphic intensity of that 2-D medium. And nothing says comic books like the adventures of a man/ boy and his monkey stranded on a planet of lost women.
› “American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) profiles Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the 40th anniversary of her milestone 1981 appointment to the Supreme Court. “Experience” recalls her quarter-century on the court as well as the role of her Arizona ranch upbringing on her personal and judicial philosophies.