okay, ill bite. why should i get into y the last man?
THANK YOU for giving me this opportunity to do a hard sell. for the purposes of this ask i will be pitching the show to people who have not seen the show at all. if you don't know what it's about, in its simplest terms, it's this: a galactic Event instantly killed almost every living mammal with a Y chromosome, leaving the survivors to rebuild. the cast is made up of majority women, though trans men and nonbinary people appear throughout the world. there is also a single cis man who survived: yorick brown, who happens to be the son of the newly appointed president (courtesy of the chain of succession). in addition to following the threads of ordinary characters struggling to survive, we also untangle the mystery of yorick's survival, and we watch the political fallout of this Event through the eyes of yorick's mother and the people closest to her.
in every way, this series has exceeded my expectations about how a story like this could be told. y: the last man is a series that centers women, but there's a way to tell a story about that and make it male-gazey, a power fantasy, a sex dream about being the one man who is the shiny prize every woman wants to capture. in that version of things, women would be unreasonable, inhuman; they would function as crazed threats driven by their sexuality. i have only just started the comics so i don't know where exactly the books land on the spectrum that runs from "male-gazey fantasy" to "complicated saga about women." but in every respect, the tv series lands smack down on the latter end of the scale. before it is anything else, it is a story about women trying to survive.
showrunner eliza clark has said that she is pretty sure she's the first woman who tried to adapt this book through all its years of development hell, and she's staffed women at the highest levels in her writers, directors, and crew. though the comic was created by a man, it's a story that's very interested in gender, and the way that womanhood or manhood or femininity or masculinity worm into and affect big heavy life things like power, faith, self-respect, and love. it's not possible to tell this speculative story without a sophisticated understanding of the way gender works in the world we have now, which is to say the patriarchy.
to that end, we see a lot of deeply thoughtful storylines about the options available to women in our current world and how their priorities must change.
kimber (amber tamblyn) is a GOP voicebox and "boymom" blogger whose devotion to the men in her life crosses the line into spiritual worship. now she lives in a world where she can't dedicate herself to advancing their power, so she has to decide how to advance what she perceives as their legacy.
hero (olivia thirlby), raised by a feminist mom who pushed her harder than her brother to prepare her for the world, is so burdened by her mother's expectations that she hates herself deeply. this makes her easy prey for a manipulative leader to seduce her into a group that makes her feel like she belongs.
nora (marin ireland) has worked for men all her life and gotten used to accepting and playing to the power imbalance. she's gotten used to groveling for scraps and swallowing humiliations and mistreatment. now, for the first time in her life, it occurs to her that she can build a different relationship to power if she wants it.
dr. allison mann (diana bang) is a genius, just incredibly emotionally mature and perceptive. however, she's had to become rigidly individualistic, as no one was ever willing to collaborate with her or trust in her work. in the new world, the stakes are so different, and the research that will define the future comes down to her. living with that pressure is an unimaginable task to do alone.
agent 355 (the fucking incredible ashley romans) has worked her ass off to repress her interiority as much as possible and function as a weapon. she has never opened herself up to desire or love. in this new world, she's finally forced to accept that she can't survive that way, and being a human means feeling and wanting and sometimes even giving her body what it wants.
i listened to a couple of podcast interviews with eliza clark (the showrunner) over the weekend and i was really struck by how she talked about the world she developed and how she focused on centering women in every way. one easy lens to see this is through the way the series deals with romance. on the podcast comic book club (around 34 minutes in), clark was asked about any plans to develop a romantic relationship between yorick and his bodyguard, agent 355, which is a part of the comics. she responded:
"for the sake of the story, all of [the original comic's romantic] options are still on the table. all of the triangulations' feelings are still on the table. at the same time, [...] there is something about - to me, a show that... you know, there are other men on the show, there's not just one man on the show, but it's majority women. it's a show that centers women. and for a show that centers women to have the central romantic relationship not be the heterosexual one and the relationship between a man and a woman in it ultimately be about a deep bond but not necessarily a sexual bond, i think is pretty cool. i mean, maybe that gives it away, but i think allison and 355 are the people you should be shipping."
i think it's really bold and really striking that a show called y: the last man would leave its titular last (cis) man out of its central romance. again, it's choosing to tell a story that isn't beholden to the male gaze.
i'm similarly impressed with the way the series shows the stress and fear of being a gender minority through the character of sam jordan (elliot fletcher), a trans man. sam spends a portion of the season stranded with a group of women whose gender politics can be seen as analogous to radfems. we see a lot of zoomed-out shots that emphasize how small and powerless he feels in this group that has such contempt and distrust towards him. sam's character is necessary for the series to engage with gendered violence as part and parcel of any exploration of gender. whatever role gender played in the world before the Event, it's not over.
all in all, i think this show is really sharp and really attuned to what gender means in 2021, and i would hate for people to miss out on it just because the word "man" is in the title. please give it a try!
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