Who hasn’t wondered, at some point or another, whether life wouldn’t be a whole lot simpler if it was simply us, an empty street and all the cheesecake we could eat? (Perhaps that last thing is just me but you get the overall point right?)
Sandwiched like sardines in our commuter train carriage, tinny EDM leaking like aural battery acid over our ears from someone’s none-too-snug MP3 player headphones, the smell of rank body odour up our noses in ways so comprehensive we may not be able to ever smell the flowers again even if we stop to do so, all we can think about is blissful, unending solitude, far from the madding crowd and it’s obsession with moving and surging like lemmings drunk on a factory vat of vodka.
But what if we got our wish? What if, like Phil Miller (Will Forte) on Fox’s new anarchically-hilarious new sitcom The Last Man on Earth, we woke up one day to find out everyone had just disappeared and left us behind to do our own thing forevermore?
What would we do then?
If you’re anything like Phil, who is the sole survivor of an robustly efficient plague that wiped out 99.9999 % of humanity, you would likely first begin by partying like it’s 2099 (which it isn’t but just because you’re alone doesn’t mean you can’t aspire to dancing like it is.)
And party he does, but not before driving around the United States in a giant RV the size of Canada, gathering up artwork from museums that, let’s face it, are facing a precipitous decline in patronage, carpet rugs with the presidential seal from the Oval Office and Michael Jordan’s framed jersey with which to decorate his home, wherever that may end up being, and crossing off each and every state he’s checked for signs of life with a sharpie on a giant now superfluous map.
Settling back in Tucson, which, no offence to the good people of Arizona’s second largest urban conurbation looks like the perfect bleak setting for an apocalyptically quirky sitcom, he proceeds to play extreme bowls with a giant stack of full fish-less fish tanks, fill a wading pool with margarita mix which he then drinks with a giant straw while swimming in it, and populates a local bar with a clientele made up of tennis balls, footballs, gold balls, all with smile, happy faces on them.
(This is after admitting that Tom Hanks, whose relationship with Wilson the Volleyball in Castaway he initially disparages, may have been onto something after all; they look kind of like people, never talk back and don’t drink the Scotch.)
It sounds like everyone’s commuting fantasy come to do whatever-the-hell-you-like-f**k-the-rules life.
Phil cares not for social propriety, adopting boxers as his standard unit of clothing, using his giant pool as an outdoor toilet – amazing what judiciously cut holes in a diving board can do for ease of use in that regard – and treating his home as a giant rubbish strewn pit.
Because after all who’s going to tell you not to right? You are judge, jury and executioner of what’s OK and what’s not, and there’s no one, literally no one people, to tell you what to do.
The seething, smelly, selfish commuting rabble has been silenced and you stand victoriously alone, able to drive where you please, how you please, in whatever you please, shopping for whatever takes your fancy without a single payment and oh yeah, masturbating a lot, so much so that you feel compelled to apologise to God for its volume.
It sounds a like a lot of fun and as Will Forte admitted to Rolling Stone, it’s a lot of fun to play too:
“One of the best parts of writing the show is that I get to think of these stupid little things that I’d do if nobody else was around — and then I get to go do them. I get to run over things with a steamroller. I get to use a flamethrower. Basically, I just wrote a character who’s pretty much a version of what I would be like in that situation. If everyone on Earth was wiped out by a virus, I wouldn’t have a clue about things like electricity or plumbing. I wouldn’t know what the fuck to do!”
But a funny thing happens on the way to nirvana as Phil realises he might just miss having someone to talk to, that it’s possible other people weren’t completely a great big fat waste of time and having some company might not have sucked to high heaven with a giant straw full of three-days-in-the-sun margaritas.
Just when everything seems more than a little too bleak, and his dating efforts with a store mannequin have come to nothing – she’s the strong, silent, and um, plastic type; you know the kind – along comes prim-and-proper Carol Pilbasian (Kristen Schaal), who in marked contrast to the heavily-bearded, hygienically-challenged Phil is a very model of upholding civilisation in the midst of anarchy.
Well if there were enough people to create anarchy, she would be totally holding the line against it.
As it is, her insistence on Phil stopping at Stop signs, and not stealing things out of stores and even marrying him before they begin, ahem, re-populating the earth as is their calling (so she believes) starts to look faintly, hilariously ridiculous, providing much of the comedy of opposites that anchors the show, at least in the first couple of episodes.
It’s the relationship between Phil and Carol, an Odd Couple if ever there was one, that lends The Last Man on Earth much of its offbeat comedic air and its unexpected poignancy.
Phil is behaving exactly as I think many of us would act in the same situation, his disillusion at having so much unending freedom kicking in about when it would for any of us, while Carol, god bless her craft-loving neatly-darned socks, is determined that the life she once lived is still possible, albeit with a few less people left to populate it.
The true delight of the show is that it isn’t just two people, played to comedic perfection by Forte and Schaal, confronting the end of the world in their own unique, totally divergent ways; it’s a surprisingly touchy exploration of the way in which we all need each other, despite the effort and volume we put into complaining about the dumb things all of us while in close proximity to each other.
Sure Phil blows things up, steamrollers over them and sets fire to them with a flamethrower, and Carol is inordinately obsessed with decorating the church in which she and Phil marry to a degree that is utterly unnecessary; but underlying all this is a desperate crying need for someone else to share things with.
If that all sounds a tad un-sitcom-like, you might want to consider that shows like the tragi-comic Mom are redefining what is fit and proper to include in a sitcom, and even laughfests like The Big Bang Theory are willing to drop the punchlines for a second if it means a point about basic humanity is made.
The great cleverness of The Last Man on Earth, brought to us by the team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie) – hmm wherever did Phil’s name come from I wonder? Hmm … – is that balances the fantasy humour with the sort of genuinely authentic sense of being bereft that would settle in once the booze was all drunk, the porn all, ahem, used, and cushions bedazzled with “No scrubs”.
We would all party like Phil and then crash and burn when we realised that mannequins and sports balls with faces sharpie’d onto them do not engaging life partners or even casual friends make.
We have been promised all manner of gasp-inducing of reveals over the 13 episode serial arc of the first season, but whatever happens to Phil, Carol and the newly-arrived limo-driving Melissa Shart (January Jones), what gives The Last Man on Earth true relevancy, pathos and watchability is its very real observation that no man or woman will ever want to be forever an island, even if they are surrounded by a lake of margarita mix and have the mother of all straws with which to drink it.