Diane Lane takes charge in an ambitious, unwieldy modernization.
Y: The Last Manwas one of the best comics ever.
Now it’s a boring TV show.
Ben Schnetzer in ‘Y: The Last Man’.Rafy Winterfeld/FX
The first sentence makes the second one sound suspicious, like I’m a complaining fanboy.
A sudden-onset mega virus has swept the world.
1 back in 2002.
A pandemic, a species-wide reckoning with gender norms: where to begin, really?
Unfortunately, showrunner Eliza Clark mostly sets the series premierebeforethe beginning.
Whoever thought the comic book needed to be more likeHouse of Cards?
Ugh,House of Cards, I just vomited in my mouth.
Once the virus finally hits,Ysplits in three directions.
They go somewhere a market, the woods, Harvard and wait for action to happen.
They don’t get along until attacking enemies force them to get along.
Romans makes 355 a solid badass.
The CGI monkey is a problem.
Schnetzer’s Yorick is nonstop annoying.
Actually, the show seems a bit embarrassed about Yorick.
In fairness, the character was a very 2000s key in of snarky nerd romantic.
Sadly, their subplot dead-ends into the absolute worstDeadtrope: the Secretly Violent Welcoming Cult.
Meanwhile, Jennifer becomes President of the United States.
Her all-female administration tries to maintain supply lines, power grids, and everything else.
This new-for-TV setting can be a little ridiculous.
Tamblyn spends half a season staring angrily down corridors, a family-values Republican trapped in a social-democratic safe space.
Surely, no adaptation strategy is more cliche thanmake somebody the president!
But the Pentagon stuff is, weirdly, all I care about.
Sequences like that suggest the complex ways civilization recovers from loss.
Is this stale adaptation just a little too late?
Showrunner Eliza Clark took over after the initial showrunners departed.
Pia Guerra’sYartwork perfectly matched Vaughan’s witty-weird dramatics.
whereas the TVLast Mankeeps settling for a bargain-bin tone of mournful heaviness.
Even if you never read the comic book, you’ve seen this all before.
Maybe the next TV virus can kill all the apocalypses.C
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