(The following article contains spoilers for The Last Man on Earth, up through episode
The Last Man on Earth is currently halfway through its first season, which makes it an unusual candidate for my blog. Typically, I like to write about TV shows at the beginning or end of a season, but The Last Man on Earth is doing something that I’m not quite sure I’ve ever seen before. In short, it is a sitcom without a status quo.
As I’ve stated in this blog before, the sitcom formula is built on stasis. Since the core of a “situation comedy” is a specific situation, it is difficult for characters to change or advance because that very change threatens the show’s premise. The Last Man on Earth, however, has been functioning since the pilot as a show where change IS the status quo. It’s been exciting to watch, gaining some ground from the “what will happen next?!” feeling that’s usually reserved for dramas, but also makes it very hard to get invested in the show’s future. We’re now halfway through the first season, and still have no idea what the show is about.
The primary reason for this confusion is that sitcoms are driven by character dynamics, and The Last Man on Earth has added a new character in every odd-numbered episode yet. This means that we’ve already seen four “situations” taken on: a show about being the last living person on the face of the planet, a show about being forced into a relationship with somebody you can’t stand, a show about being in love with somebody other than your wife, and a show about being jealous of another man.
This structure (which, again, has been a lot of fun to watch so far) is also tricky because, since the characters are constantly reacting to new circumstances, we have very little in the way of a baseline of who they are. We spent the pilot with Will Forte’s Phil Miller, but much of that time was establishing how somebody might cope being completely alone on the planet. Since other characters have entered the show, Phil has come across as a something of a sociopath, a manipulative jerk who is willing to lie and rationalize his desire to sleep with a woman he finds more attractive and less irritating than his wife. We can sympathize with his situation (he didn’t exactly enter into his marriage for love), but not with the way he’s gone about it.
Kristen Schaal’s Carol has had some fun characterization, especially in the second and third episode, when The Last Man on Earth was still strictly about her and Phil. She has an irrational obsession with rules and standards of the pre-apocalyptic world, and is both overtly irritating and oddly sympathetic. Melissa and Todd, however, have functioned primarily as a goal and an obstacle, respectively, for Phil. January Jones (of Mad Men fame) is holding her own, but has been given no real comedic work so far, and Mel Rodriguez’s Todd (who admittedly just joined the show in the double-episode this week) is only being characterized as a kind, sympathetic fat guy. It all works for the short-term goals of the show, but it’s impossible to see how the show will gel once it hits its status quo (whatever that is).
As boring as many sitcoms become a few years in, after exhausing their premise, The Last Man on Earth has the opposite problem. Christopher Miller and Phil Lord have proven themselves adept at taking weak ideas (a 21 Jump Street reboot, a Lego Movie) and turning them into excellent films, but here they’re doing something much different: taking an interesting premise (the last surviving people on Earth) and turning it into a sustainable sitcom. Halfway into the season, we still don’t know if they have succeeded.