An adaptation of Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra‘s sixty-issue comic book series Y: The Last Man has been in the works for years – first as a movie and then, thankfully, as a TV show, which is a much better fit for the sprawling tale.
But the show has been in the works at FX for a long time now, so what’s up with the delay? According to writer/showrunner Michael Green, you can blame the 2016 presidential election for the long wait.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Green explained how the election of America’s current president made the writing process far more difficult and nearly made him walk away from the project altogether:
“It would have been a very different show, and very different development process, had the election not been as horrifying as it was. I had to put the script down for a couple months and really reassess it tonally, because it became a different creature, it became violent protest. It couldn’t not be political, and I had to embrace it, and I had to find my way in, and I had to find a way to channel my own dismay, disappointment and rage into it, while still keeping it what it is. For a minute there I almost walked away.”
Green also offered an update about his approach to the show, and how they’re looking to avoid a Lost-esque situation in which the showrunners are scrambling through the middle of a story without an end date in mind. Y: The Last Man will have an established length before it begins, “whether it’s 60, 70, or 80 episodes”:
“I’m gonna pick a number, and I’m gonna stick to it. And I’m gonna write to it. There’s so many brilliant things in that comic, the two biggest are the premise, and the ending.”
If you still haven’t read the comics, I can’t recommend them highly enough. I fell away from reading comics altogether a few years ago, but Y: The Last Man was the first comic series I read since I was a kid, and it was the perfect re-entry point that allowed me to see the possibilities of storytelling in this medium (I soon followed it up with Preacher, Fables, and a handful of others, but Y will always have a special place in my heart).
If you’ve been coming to sites like this for years and still don’t know what this comic is about, A) I’d once again recommend that you check it out yourselves, because maybe reading it completely fresh would be the best way to go about it, but B) I’ll drop the synopsis below in case you’re interested:
A mysterious plague has killed every man on earth except Yorick Brown, who was somehow spared. That is the provocative premise of the comics series whose first five issues make up this book. The sole Y-chromosomed survivor is an amiable, headstrong young man, the son of a U.S. congresswoman and, as it happens, an amateur escape artist. He spends most of the story on the run from a tribe of self-styled Amazons bent on eliminating the last vestige of patriarchy. He is also trying, with a bioengineer who may be responsible for the worldwide “gendercide,” to figure out why he survived; hoping to reach his girlfriend in Australia; and, of course, contemplating the repopulation of the planet. Rather pedestrian artwork doesn’t do much to liven the story, though its straightforwardness imparts deadpan believability to such ramifications as the female secretary of agriculture ascending to the presidency. Fast-paced anyway, the yarn introduces a large number of intriguing characters and plotlines as it lays the groundwork for what promises to be a compelling series.
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