Y: The Last Man TV series

The whole first season of Y: The Last Man is available on Hulu:FX now, and since there has been no discussion I wondered if anyone else has been watching it. I was a big fan of the comic--I still own the whole thing, mainly in TPB form. But the first year I was still buying individual monthly issues, and was pleasantly surprised when I dug them out and remembered that I had the first issue signed by inker Jose Marzan Jr. (never had a shot at co-creators Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, unfortunately).

I think the TV adaptation did an excellent job  of capturing the comic, and I like the casting, especially the actors playing Yorick, Agent 355, and of course Ampersand. The setup is the same as the comic, a post-apocalyptic world where a mysterious cataclysmic event simultaneously killed every mammal with a Y chromosome but for one man (Yorick Brown) and his male pet monkey Ampersand. There were more scenes set just before the event than I remember from the comic. We see Agent 355 working undercover before being assigned to the White House, and there is a scene there just when the plague hit, showing the President and all of the other men in the room dying horribly.

The science of chromosomes and depiction of gender are both more sophisticated than the comic. So  trans women with Y chromosomes also died, as well as women with androgen insensitivity who were unaware they possessed Y chromosomes. And there is a regular trans male character in the cast, which confused me at first, since the comic made a big deal of Yorick being the only character who looked like a man. The politics have a contemporary "culture wars" feel that was not in the comic, either, at least not in such a pronounced way.

I enjoyed the show, and hope that the cancelation after one season won't prevent it from being continued somewhere else. I understand that the main reason was pandemic delays that made paying actors and staff prohibitive.

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  • I was interested in Y: The Last Man the TV series, but I don't have FX on Hulu so I haven't had the opportunity to watch it. 

    I've read Y: The Last Man the comics series from Vertigo, thanks to my friendly neighborhood library, and have said many times I liked it, except for lead character Yorick. So maybe actor Ben Schnetzer's performance may have overcome my objections.

    Articles I've read about the TV version concur that it spent more time showing what happened before the event than the comic did, which goes to my oft-stated belief that comics are comics and movies are movies and TV is TV, and the creators in each medium need to do what's best to serve the story in that medium.

    Plus, the one thing I wanted more of in the comic was to see the harm and damage and havoc that happened from every male dropping dead all at once, and the struggle to keep a society going afterward. Like one article pointed out, maybe half the men died -- but in that number is 80 to 90 percent of the people who operate power plants. So how do the survivors get them up and running when they don't know how, because women have been excluded from having those jobs? That kind of stuff was more interesting to me than everybody chasing after a whiny, useless slacker. As much as the world needed Yorick, there were several issues when I could almost want the people out to kill him to succeed.

    So, with only one season done, how far did Y: The Last Man the TV series get into the story?

  • I'd say the show made it through the first year (TPB Vol. 1-2), roughly. Yorick and 355 had gotten to Dr. Mann's lab in Boston, and had set out for California. The last big scenes took place in Marrisville, Ohio (I guess: not sure if the show changed that detail). Anyway, it was still a town settled by the population of a women's prison. The Daughters of the Amazons (the group that included Yorick's sister Hero) showed up demanding to execute Yorick, resulting in a huge battle. Like the comic, the Amazon leader dies. She was rendered so thoroughly unlikeable by the actress playing her that I was happy to see her go!

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