Yorick Brown may be the last man on earth, but he won’t be The Last Man on FX on Hulu for much longer. The network has cancelled Y: The Last Man before the first season has even ended.
This may not be the end, though, as showrunner Eliza Clark is looking for a new home for the series, which has so much more story to tell.
Clark released a statement on Twitter over the weekend.
https://twitter.com/TheElizaClark/status/1449800214357762051
Y: The Last Man had an incredibly long road to the screen. It was in development in 2015; FX hired Michael Green (American Gods) to be the showrunner; Green and co-showrunner Aïda Mashaka Croal left the series; it was supposed to premiere in 2020. The cast changed a lot.
The series, which finally premiered last month, is better than anyone might have expected from all of the behind the scenes turmoil. It’s smart, not too grimly apocalyptic, and it does an excellent job of balancing a whole lost of storylines and themes—survival, leadership, trauma and chaos, loss and destruction, and a specific, almost practical sort of hope.
Charlie Jane Anders was one of the writers for the show’s first season, and wrote about the experience for her newsletter, detailing how the show adjusted the story to correct a major issue with the comic: It largely ignored the existence of trans people. Anders wrote:
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In the end, it wasn’t enough to just include trans characters, or to avoid spreading misinformation about what makes a man or a woman. We had to educate our viewers about how complicated and beautiful human biology and gender really are, and how little say our chromosomes have about who we become. … How did we provide this education on screen? Let’s just say it’s a good thing that one of our main characters is a queer geneticist.
I’m not going to promise we did everything perfectly — we’re fallible humans, television is a huge machine with many moving parts, and I wasn’t in charge of anything — but I can say that we were aware of the pitfalls of our premise, and we kept talking about ways to mitigate them.
It’s going to be really disappointing if we don’t get to see the rest of the creative team’s vision on screen. Y: The Last Man creator Brian K. Vaughan wrote on Instagram:
This is not the first time in twenty years I’ve seen Yorick & co. escape the seemingly inescapable! I love this show, and I’m very hopeful Y will find a new home, not just because it happens to employ more extraordinary women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community—both in front of and behind the camera—than any project I’ve ever been a part of, but because they’ve made something spectacular, the kind of thoughtful, contemporary, fearless evolution of the comic that Pia Guerra and I always wanted.
The eighth episode of the series aired today, and there are two more yet to come. Hopefully, it won’t be long before another network picks up Y for a second season.
