Can ‘The Last Man On Earth’ Turn It Around?

I have faith in Will Forte. Yes, partially because of his turn as Paul on 30 Rock, but largely because I really enjoyed the first season of The Last Man On Earth, which just had its sophomore season’s mid-season finale on Sunday night. That finale was intense, but it came after a season filled with a healthy dose of “meh.” The question now is whether or not The Last Man On Earth can save itself from itself, and whether a lackluster season can bounce back on the premise of just one episode.

When Last Man began, we were introduced to a lonely Phil Miller (Will Forte), roaming the barren Tuscon landscape after a mystery apocalypse killed everyone. On the verge of suicide, he destroyed, despaired, drank and talked to himself. (On a positive note, he did manage to create himself a margarita pool.) It was an equal parts funny and poignant take on what it might really be like to be the last man on earth, without any of the survivalist angst of traditional apocalypse narratives. There was something both funny and touching about watching Phil watch Cast Away and laughing at Tom Hanks for talking to a ball–”Balls are for fun!”–and then introducing his own cast of ball-friends.

At the end of that first episode, Phil meets Carol (Kristen Schaal), the last woman on earth, and we’re posed with an interesting question: what if you couldn’t stand the other last person on earth? Phil’s hopelessness rubs off on Carol, the consummate optimist, and Last Man flexes what, in its first season, was its finest asset. Its giant heart. Watching Phil reinvigorate Carol’s passion for growing tomatoes, of all things, by rigging her up with running water is the stuff that’s missing from a lot of apocalypse narratives, which is the simple comfort of life’s small, mundane pleasures. In the first season of Last Man there’s no encroaching threat other than the antipathy creeping up from within. And Forte and Schaal manage to strangle that with their uniquely quirky comedic abilities. They make the apocalypse seem, well, nice.

That is until Melissa (January Jones) shows up at the end of episode 3, and the narrative takes a weird, but also weirdly workable, turn: Phil is trying to get laid, which he initially marries Carol for, and then spends the next two episodes trying to convince both her and Melissa to allow him to also sleep with the latter. Will Forte as Phil the creepy sex desperado is comedic genius, and by the time Todd (Mel Rodriguez) turns up Phil has become a sneaky skunk and endearingly pathetic, even as he tries to manipulate sex out of two women. Which is a stretch and a testament to the writing, because it’s not easy to make a man attempting to elicit sex from unwilling women likeable. But like all things Last Man, it’s about the conversation. There’s no threat, no pressure, just a lot of really ridiculous conversation and reasoning by a ridiculous man under an even more ridiculous set of circumstances. And it works.

The priorities in this particular apocalypse aren’t that far removed from those of our own lives: sex and relationships. While everyone is just trying to get laid or fall in love, and the characters butt heads over various petty dramas, there’s nothing pressing or particularly strenuous about this particular apocalypse. Soon a cow is introduced (Episode 8) and another two female characters, Erica (Cleopatra Coleman) and Gail (Mary Steenburgen) (Episode 9), and by Episode 10 Phil is in the dog house with everyone, setting up what will become a boring precedent for the second season. In Episode 11, Phil becomes “Tandy” as he’s given a nemesis, another man named Phil Miller (Boris Kodjoe), who seems to be the last handsomest man on earth. The season closes with Tandy banished from the group in Tucson, and a shot of his brother, Mike (Jason Sudekis), floating in a remote space station, looking down upon earth.

This first go-round was a great, funny season about petty jealousies and getting laid despite the total annihilation of humanity. It’s different from any other apocalypse narrative because survival isn’t key here: these middle class people are still stuck with the day-to-day interpersonal desires they had before the apocalypse because there’s no overt threat to their well-being. In this way, the first season set up the second season perfectly: Tandy on his own again, with a strong, handsome nemesis, and his brother still out there and alive. But unfortunately, the second season fell into some old ways, and it wasn’t for the best. Opening on Tandy (who was joined by Carol), doing much the same as he was at the strat of the first season (albeit this time with a companion): cruising around (this time in a fighter jet), looting, drinking, breaking stuff, and talking to his ball-friends. We get a little more of Mike in his space station, and find his behavior (talking to caterpillars) remarkably similar to Tandy’s.

The first two episodes call back to Tandy and Carol’s tender moments with new ones, but it’s not long until they’re off to find the group in Malibu at the end of Episode 202, which sets of a chain of events that lands Tandy in the dog house, out of it, back in it, out of it, and back in it again. Indeed, most of the second season of Last Man is about the group taking turns being pissed off at people. Tandy finds himself in a stockade in Episode 203 and solitary confinement in Episode 204 before being let grudgingly back into the group. Todd and Tandy end up back in the stockade at the end of Episode 205, and none of the events that caused either of them to be reprimanded (mostly around stealing food, cheese and bacon) were repetitive. By mid-season 2, it was becoming apparent that Last Man was going to need to raise the stakes if it was going to survive.

The repetitiveness continues into Episode 206, which starts with the gang playing Jenga (now with gold bars), a favorite pastime of Tandy in season 1. As gas starts to expire, (hot) Phil urges the group to change their priorities, but the response is simply YOLO, which felt pretty much like an exact reflection of where the writers were at. With no season arc, Last Man (and I’m sorry to say this) was boring by the middle of its season, with the nugget of Erica’s pregnancy offering the promise of a solid through-line. When (hot) Phil punches Tandy, the same crime and punishment cycle is relied on, and relationship/group politics continue to dominate right through Episodes 207 and 208.

Luckily for Last Man, episodes 209 and 210 began to show promise once again. I was worried that I’d have to give up on the show (which I was reluctant to do given my love for all things Forte and Schaal), but like The Walking Dead, Last Man punches you right in the gut when it needs to. With Episode 209’s secret Santa story tugging at the LOL-strings and the heart-strings, Erica and (hot) Phil’s baby putting some much needed stakes on the table, the episode grappled with a lot of very real, very human shit. Mike’s loneliness in the space station and an attempted suicide really hammered in the intensity of the apocalypse in a way the show hadn’t done yet, so that by the mid-season finale, tension was built like never before in the shows two season run.

The Last Man On Earth left us in a really dark place. With (hot) Phil flatlining and Mike hurtling for Earth, the stakes really couldn’t have been driven higher. At the eleventh hour, Last Man went from zero to eleven, giving a good reason for us to come back for the next part of Season 2. The wonderful thing about adding stakes to a show already stacked to the brim with loveable characters, fantastic performances and hearty jokes is that at the end, there’s the promise of an emotional pay-off as well. If Last Man can pull it off, and put it’s heart where its mouth is without sacrificing itself to the same Season 2 lull, it will surely keep its audience invested.

[Stream the first two seasons of The Last Man On Earth on Hulu]

Kat George is a writer and a Fast & Furious obsessive. Follow her on Twitter: @kat_george.