WHAT MAKES A MAN
Apocalypse of ‘Y’ reveals other-gendered world
Killing off men, “Y: The Last Man” quickly learns, doesn’t actually solve the world’s problems.
The long-gestating FX series on Hulu, premiering Monday and based on Brian K. Vaughan’s 2002 comic book series, opens hours before a cataclysmic event that kills everyone on Earth with a Y chromosome.
All but two, that is: Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzer) and his monkey, Ampersand.
Where the conundrums in “Y: The Last Man” are international, the show is partly set in New York City and is focused on Yorick, his mother Jennifer (Diane Lane), a congresswoman thrust into the presidency based on a male-dominated line of succession, and sister Hero (Olivia Thirlby), an EMT hiding her own secret that vanishes into the chaos.
“It’s a big story and we’ll get there, but for now we are focused on this group of people and their journey,” showrunner Eliza Clark told the Daily News.
“I think the fun of it is that this horrific event happens, it affects the whole world and people respond differently. Both the book and I are interested in how to respond on a character level.”
Originally greenlit in 2015, “Y: The Last Man” has gone through its fair share of scripts before finally making it to the air. In a way, though, the timing couldn’t be more perfect, on the hopeful side of a global pandemic that has killed more than 1 million people and eight months after the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol. Reality is not quite as catastrophic as the fictional apocalypse, but “Y” seems less farfetched than it did in 2002, or even 2015.
“A lot of things that it predicted about how Americans responded to crisis was fascinating to me, because it could be a unifying moment, and it is, within factions. It’s interesting that Bryan and (cartoonist Pia Guerra) anticipated the intense polarization that something that an event like that would create. I worry more about the human response to things than the things themselves,” Lane, 56, told The News.
“It’s an interesting exploration that would have been conjecture had we not lived through what we lived through. This story winds up actually holding up a pretty prescient mirror in some ways of human beings and how they react to things and how we cleave to one another and what creates that identity that makes people say ‘who am I in this predicament? What side do I stand on?’ ”
That dichotomy plays out in two places: First, in the White House, where Kimberly Cunningham, the daughter of the former male president, played by Amber Tamblyn, continues playing politics and setting dividing lines between Republicans and Democrats; and outside, where a detective, Roxanne (Missi Pyle), has started what can only be described as a survivalist cult.
Even with the world thrown into mayhem, there are two sides: them and us, right and wrong, good and bad.
What there isn’t for the most part, is man and woman. The series, unlike the comic book, takes a more serious examination of sex and gender, but this world is still one almost exclusively without men.
Except for Yorick, who views his uniqueness not as an honor but rather as a hindrance to his only goal, which is getting back to his girlfriend.
“He’s not Luke Skywalker, who’s searching for something greater and then, oh my gosh, he finds this inciting incident that launches him into this hero’s journey,” Schnetzer, 31, told The News.
The question of “Y: The Last Man” becomes what happens next. What happens when life as we know it ends? Can we rebuild? Can we start over? Can we change?
“The show is about identity and the different systems and structures that conspire to create our identities ... white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism. What the characters are grappling with in the first season is, ‘What parts of myself are really me and which parts of them were imposed upon me?’ ” Clark told The News. “I really believe that people uphold these systems regardless of gender. Ultimately, the show has a hopeful point of view about the possibility of change when those systems start to come undone, but people have to work to tear them down. Just because this event happens doesn’t mean the world changes.”