The Last Man’ Review – The Hollywood Reporter

As I am writing this review, footage of terrifyingly flooded, largely evacuated New York City is everywhere.

I’ve spent the week wallowing in documentaries tied to the anniversary of 9/11, a snapshot of urban dystopia so harrowing no Hollywood equivalent could ever compete.

FX on Hulu’s long-awaited adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s comic classic Y: The Last Man is such an album of apocalyptic greatest hits that the comparisons will likely range from The Stand to The Walking Dead to 28 Days Later to The Strain to Revolution to Jericho. The most persistent comparisons, for me at least, were to a more uncomfortable version of dystopia, namely a real world colored by COVID and climate change, threaded with indelible memories of September 11, 2001.

Perhaps that’s why showrunner Eliza Clark’s take on the beloved property (which was published from 2002 to 2008) captures and at times even enhances so much of what was rich and resonant about Y: The Last Man and effectively delivers to many of its adored characters, while falling short in one key area. The comic doesn’t lack for darkness and gravity, yet it’s primarily a fun yarn. Through six episodes sent to critics, a lot of the fun has gone missing in the TV show. The series is often provocative, generally compelling and almost never quite as entertaining as it should be.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s entirely reasonable for a TV series about the sudden and gruesome death of half the world’s population to be dour and depressing. But that just isn’t the tone of the comic. And as Netflix’s recent Sweet Tooth adaptation proved, it’s fully possible to find a wide array of emotional colors and even levity in a postapocalyptic wasteland.

The preference for darkness in Y is evident from the get-go, in a pilot written by Clark and directed by Louise Friedberg. In contrast to the comic, the series devotes much more time to establishing the characters and circumstances before the abrupt onset of a plague that causes everybody on Earth with a Y chromosome to horrifyingly bleed out in the middle of daily activities. This leads to gnarled traffic jams, thousands of plane crashes, the upheaval of world governments and, of course, corpses absolutely everywhere.

The exceptions to the Y-chromosome carnage are Yorick (Ben Schnetzer), a 20-something aspiring escape artist, and his not particularly helpful helper monkey, Ampersand (surprisingly well-rendered by computer effects). Yorick is the son of Jennifer Brown…