The Last Man on Earth Series Premiere Review: Can't Live Without 'Em

The Last Man on Earth S01E01 & S01E02: "Alive in Tucson" & "The Elephant in the Room"

HEY BUDDY! Spoilers follow for the hour-long series premiere of The Last Man on Earth, and I'm going to jump into them pretty quickly, so if you haven't finished watching, then go away or make peace with being spoiled!

Fox's new comedy The Last Man on Earth started off like nothing I've ever seen on network television: as a comedy with a cast of one. Well, two if you count the hairy mass on the face of former Saturday Night Live cast member Will Forte, who stars as the titular man (and who also created and executive-produces the series).

It's 2020, two years after a virus has wiped out almost everyone on the planet, and Forte's Phil Miller has the entire place to himself. Bearing witness as the guy went about his days with no rules, no societal pressures, and no judgment (margarita pool!) was fascinating stuff, and Forte—one of SNL's better recent exports—carried each scene so well; I didn't give a damn that there weren't any other characters hanging around. It was hysterical to watch him drag trinkets from the Smithsonian into his house, open doors with a gun, and talk to his balls (athletic, not testicular, but would you be surprised if it turned out he had faces shaved onto those little guys?). The series' first 20-something minutes felt like an indie comedy, and the exact kind of risk that broadcast television needs to take more of in order to rise above the typical dreck that pollutes primetime.

Unfortunately, broadcast television doesn't care about taking risks, because innovation doesn't always pay the bills. And so, at the end of the first episode—halfway through the premiere—we learned (along with Phil) that he isn't actually alone in this wasteland, and Kristen Schaal's Carol made her debut.

The arrival of another character was inevitable; after all, the show isn't called The Last PERSON on Earth, and we knew that other actors, including Schaal and Mad Men's January Jones, would eventually appear (though we didn't know when or how). But Carol's entrance immediately snuffed out some of the spark from the show's opening scenes. I could've easily watched another few hours of Phil schlepping around an empty Tucson and pondering where the should might go next.

Once Carol showed up, The Last Man on Earth took some predictable turns. Much of "The Elephant in the Room" could've been retitled "Men are From Tucson, Women are From Tampa," as Carol's attitude is obviously the uptight polar opposite of Phil's open-robe approach to a world without any order whatsoever. She wanted to stop at stop signs, she wanted to park in designated parking spots, she wanted prepositions to remain un-dangled. But come on, stopping at stop signs? I barely stop at stop signs even when I'm flyin' through school zones. What a buzzkill.

The result was a series of typical rom-com-style conflicts. Carol wanted to clean up Phil's house, he wanted her out of his space. She wanted to get married, he was just horny. She wanted this, he wanted that. It all amounted to a bunch of sitcom relationship tropes set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic America. Carol's name may as well Ca-RULES, because she's the embodiment of all the laws and regulations Phil had escaped, the antithesis of what made him so much fun to watch. And I'm no woman, but if I were, I might be offended that The Last Man on Earth's only female representative is a joyless stickler for rules and grammar, even when it's quite obvious that those things don't matter anymore (and don't even get me started on her pretentious pronunciation of to-MAH-to).

The introduction of Carol doesn't kill the show; Schaal is great, and the concept of filtering societal norms through the eyes of two very different people has promise. But it takes my gut reaction to The Last Man on Earth down a notch, from "CALL ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND TELL THEM TO WATCH THIS" to "Yeah, it's a pretty good time." The series is definitely worth a look, and I'm still eager to see what it does next, especially if it takes the original premise to new levels (what happens when the inevitable second woman is introduced?). However, I can't help but wonder what it could have been.

THE LAST NOTES ON EARTH

– "It's a $10,000 bottle of wine, by the way. It goes great with the Spaghetti-Os."

– When Phil was asking his ball friends if they wanted whiskey and he said, "Terrence? Trent? Darby?" I almost died.

– If Phil is 41 in 2020, would he really be singing the Ghostbusters theme?

– That was Alexandra Daddario as Phil's fantasy girl. You might remember her from THAT scene on True Detective.

– "I swim in it, I drink out of it, there's really no wrong way to use a margarita pool." Margarita pools RULE.