The mid-season finale (or I assume it was the mid-season finale, the scheduling is all out of whack this season) of my favourite and probably only apocalypse sitcom The Last Man on Earth aired today. So I got thinking, during the show’s hiatus I would do a little gifset series titled #reasonstowatchtlmoe or something. Because I really really want the ratings to go up enough for a season 5 to happen. And planning that out got me thinking about the reasons I like the show, and the ways in which it’s… I’m not sure I’d say progressive, necessarily, but perhaps “representative in sometimes new or interesting ways” maybe? It’s hard to say.
(Perhaps you’ve seen some gifs around of these two?
From TLMOE! And now they’re married!)
Basically, TLMOE is absolutely a flawed show, but it has this strange sort of feel to it which drags you in, and I kinda think that what it comes down to is its complete and utter refusal to judge. Most of the characters are deeply anti-social people who weren’t doing that well even before the apocalypse, and then they’re all stuck together as the last handful of people on the planet. And they behave horribly to each other sometimes (much less, now), but the show never really seems to call any individual out on it, instead constantly beating of the drum of “you messed-up folks are the last of humanity, you better damn well learn to live together” inbetween all the jokes.
Granted, this doesn’t always work the way it perhaps should (Tandy still gets away with an awful lot, despite his probable emotional disorder from years of isolation) but yet the whole show has this optimism about human nature which I think sets it apart a little. No matter how much of an asshole a character is, they still end up back in the weird found-family fold. This show is not for everyone but perhaps if it’s for you…
Well, you can watch it here. Just skip season one. It’s a skip-season-one type sitcom, unfortunately.
A quick introduction to the characters can be found beneath the cut:
I also have a quicker, easier way to promote Last Man on Earth, which is “If you like Red Dwarf but wish there were more women, you’ll probably love this.”
