Hollywood skylder Peter Adolphsen billioner af dollars

I USA har en ny komedieserie netop haft premiere, Last Man on Earth, hvis hovedperson og plot - plus centrale detaljer (kunsttyveri!) - er direkte stjålet fra Peter Adolphsens Kritikerpris-nominerede 2013-roman År 9 efter Loopet (selve de zombie-giffende loopere er som det eneste ikke med). Oven i købet tyder alt på, at serien faktisk er god (bagmænd er Lego Movie-auteurerne, der ligesom heller ikke havde opfundet Lego! men de er fremragende tyve, er de), hvilket jo kun gør forbrydelsen alvorligere, GET THAT LAWSUIT ROLLING, P.! Her er et klip fra anmeldelsen på time.com, INKL. (ellers blurred (elsker den effekt)) SPOILER, for den spoiler kender vi jo allerede fra bogen, skandaløst nok:

It’s 2020. Everybody is dead from a virus. Everybody, that is, except Phil Miller (Forte), who for two years has been driving cross-country, in a scavenged tour bus, looking for signs of human life. We find him, scraggly-bearded, crossing off states one by one until he returns to Arizona, where he spray paints “Alive in Tucson” on a road sign and repairs to an abandoned mansion that he’s made his home. (There are no corpses, skeletons or signs of unrest left behind by the plague: we’re talking comedy apocalypse here, folks.)

The first half-hour of the premiere feels less like a comedy series than a well-made Funny or Die video, riffing endlessly on the idea of what a dude might do, in a world with no humans and no rules, to keep himself alive, entertained and sane. He brings home a collection of art treasures and the Oval Office rug. He goes bowling in a parking lot, using lamps as pins. He has long, rambling talks with God. (“Apologies for all of the recent masturbation. But that’s kind of on you.”) Inspired by the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, he makes him self a posse of friends by drawing faces on balls.

It’s a funny stretch, heavy on audacious sight gags. (You might expect that from producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, of The Lego Movie.) But what sells it is the understatement. Forte (who also created and writes the show) is dry and a little melancholy as Phil; there’s something almost Bill Murray-esque about his performance. The pacing of the pilot–directed by Lord and Miller–is deliberate, like a short film, with lots of lovely still-life shots to accentuate Phil’s solitude, and the soundtrack makes good use of wistful Kinks classics (“Apeman” and “Shangri-La”). You don’t usually use “beautiful” to describe a sitcom pilot, but this is one beautiful postapocalypse.

The show, as it begins, is kind of a parody of the bachelor fantasy life. There is nobody to make Phil clean up (bereft of running water, he’s reassigned one pool at his mansion as a toilet) or follow rules. He can loot porn mags and $10,000 bottles of wine. The world is his man cave.

And it’s driving him crazy. Months pass, and Phil, despairing of finding another person, decides to kill himself. And here – though information about the show and its casting has been in the press for a while – is where we must enter the spoiler zone (click the link at the top of this review if you don’t care about surprises):

Phil is discovered. He’s the last man on Earth – so far as he knows – but there’s a woman, Carol (Kristen Schaal), who’s discovered him via his spray-painted sign. They’re not exactly soulmates. Where Phil is laid-back, Carol is driven, pushy and determined to improve their lot. (Schaal, who’s specialized in comically intense characters–most recently the voice of the delightfully shouty Louise on Bob’s Burgers – is true to form here.) She moves to the neighborhood, plants a garden, and declares that it’s her and Phil’s job to repopulate the Earth–and therefore, that they need to get married.