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.
