The World of ‘Y: The Last Man’ Isn’t a Dream for Yorick Brown

Ileane Rudolph September 11, 2021, 2:00 pm

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Ben Schnetzer as Yorick in Y The Last Man — FX

Some men may fleetingly dream of being the only guy left on Earth. In reality, it’s not much fun for New Yorker Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzer, above), who, after a strange, sudden cataclysm kills billions of people, is the only surviving human with a Y chromosome.

“Yorick is the type of person who wanted to be special his entire life, and now suddenly he is,” says Y: The Last Man exec producer Eliza Clark, “but not in a way he wanted to be. He survived, and he doesn’t know why.”

The “postapocalyptic dark comedy,” as Clark calls the show, is based on a series of award-winning graphic novels that follow Yorick’s journey, including his travels to the White House, where his congresswoman mother (Diane Lane) has become president. Trying to keep Yorick’s existence hush-hush for his own safety in this chaotic world, she sends him off with a secret agent known as 355 (Ashley Romans) to track down a famous geneticist to research his genes.

But alas, poor Yorick: It’s not an easy road. Some want to kill him, and others just want to use him (for procreation). Says Clark, “It’s very dangerous for him to traverse this new landscape.” Oh, man!