And even the basics are pretty crazy — if you haven’t read it (and I strongly urge you to give it a try), it’s the story of one Yorick Brown, amateur escape artist and slacker son of a politician and a Shakespeare professor (don’t be sexist — it’s his mom who’s the politician, which becomes important), who, after some weird plague thing, becomes the only male left alive on Earth. Well, him . . . and his pet monkey. But all other male mammals are dead.
It’s a fascinating concept, and Vaughn does pretty well with it, I have to say (I have mixed feelings about the Amazons and that one Israeli Army chick, but otherwise, great stuff). I’ve heard the argument that one reason it wouldn’t be successful as a tv show is because all but one of the characters is a woman, and people just don’t want to watch a bunch of ladies do stuff on tv. Which… makes no sense to me, but I guess is a prevailing attitude in Hollywood. Even though I’m pretty sure most of the people who made this series so popular were guys. (Though girls should give it a try too, it really is good!) I mean, if the Walking Dead can be a hit show, why not this? Sure, there aren’t any zombies, but there are still plenty of fight scenes.
The whole series is kind of an epic road trip story, as Yorick goes around with Agent 355, tasked to protect him, and Dr Mann, trying to figure out how he’s staying alive so they can keep the human race going. Yorick is only interested in finding his girlfriend, who was studying abroad, but there’s a lot more at stake than young romance. And there are so many great parts of the story to tell! All of the people they meet on the way, various political plotting involving the importance of the Last Guy On Earth, all the stuff with Yorick and his sister… And the astronauts! I bet they’d get cut immediately.
But I mean, how would a screenwriter decide what to leave out? You can’t leave out any of it and have it still be such an ambitious work. It’d just be some dumb post-apocalyptic story, and they’d probably make it all about romance. Which the comic book does include, of course, but it’s not really the point of it all.
Sigh, why can’t someone just make the tv shows I want to see? Is that HBO American Gods thing still happening?
Anyway, read Y: The Last Man. It’s great.
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