Y: The Last Man fails to find new home, is canceled for good
The former FX On Hulu series is now officially as dead as the Y chromosome
After more than a literal decade of attempts to get the series off the ground—only for it to plow, like so many man-piloted jumbo jets, back into the cold and hateful earth—former FX On Hulu series Y: The Last Man is now formally and officially dead. The series had already been canceled at FX back in October, after its first season failed to take off with viewers, but showrunner Eliza Clark has now confirmed that efforts to find a new home for the post-apocalyptic series have failed.
Clark laid out the difficulties in moving a series elsewhere in a long Twitter thread last night, also teasing some of the plot threads she and her team had intended to explore if the show had been picked up for a second season. (Notably, she name checks a story from the original comics the series is based on, about a few surviving male astronauts who are off-planet when everything on Earth with a Y chromosome suddenly died.)
Based on said comic series, created by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, Y starred Ben Schnetzer as its titular last man—who actually comes off, for most of the show, as a lot less interesting than his sister (Olivia Thirlby) and mother (Diane Lane), the latter of whom becomes President Of The United States after a decent chunk of the U.S. government is killed off in the big event.
Here’s Roxana Hadidi, reviewing the finale of the show’s first season—which will now serve as its final installment—and noting its apparent dedication to never answering the big, central mystery of why everyone with a Y chromosome died off:
Season finale “Victoria” certainly doesn’t offer up much for that particular question, and it’s not like the creative team knew they would be canceled by FX on Hulu when they were crafting this tenth, and potentially last ever, episode. And given all that, it is understandable why “Victoria” ends in an open-ended way that suggests narrative expansion and more to come—in time. But without the promise of more time, and as it stands, “Victoria” is a bit of a letdown.