Last Man on Earth: Breaking Down Fred Armisen’s Guest Role
The writer’s room walkthrough for 4×10-4×12! Here’s some highlights:
On Melissa and Jasper:
Jasper likes Melissa because she’s always the most truthful with him.
She seems to be the only one who doesn’t want anything from Jasper or
care what he thinks of her. The rest of the group treats Jasper like a
child, which he is, but he was on his own for a few years before he met
the group, and only Melissa seems to recognize that he’s grown up faster
and is more mature than the others give him credit for.On killing off Karl:
Before Fred was signed on, we had this plan for a prisoner to
find the gang, be torn about whether to kill them or not, eventually
find the Rubik’s Cube and then blow up. However, once we got Fred, we
all deeply regretted this plan because he was such a hilarious, natural
addition to the group.On Melissa’s personality:
Melissa is known to be brutally honest. She cuts through the
bullshit and the sugarcoating and she says what she feels. Nobody wants
to be a murderer, not even her. She killed a guy (Jon Hamm) and it
almost ruined her – but from her perspective, this is a different
world.On Tandy:
He’s a more mature version of the same ole dipshit. Kinda like how McDonalds offers salads now.
On Melissa’s bodily autonomy:
But we got to a point with the Todd/Melissa storyline where a baby was
going to happen, and we felt it was super important to have a woman in
this new world absolutely refuse to get pregnant.
I love these interviews and I’m really glad how much they seem to have thought through the characters and what’s important. Also, reading about the stuff that they decided against is always a blast