Y: The Last Man: 5 reasons why the show had a great start

Here’s why the series premiere of Y: The Last Man did a fantastic job of of getting viewers interested in the show.

Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man is among the best reads for any comic book fan. Actually, you don’t have to be into comic books to enjoy this story. The tale of what would happen if everything with a Y chromosome (except one man) mysteriously died sets up an interesting premise, giving readers the chance to see how it would affect the world both immediately and in the years to come.

One way to judge a classic is to see if it survives the test of time. The first issue of Y: The Last Man debuted in September of 2002. That’s almost 20 years ago and now it’s being adapted in a TV series. After all this time, the story is still an interesting one.

One episode in, and FX’s Y: The Last Man is off to a good start. And here are five reasons that the show is headed in the right direction.

Changing just enough

One thing that’s guaranteed when adapting a comic book to the screen are changes from the source material. It’s inevitable. In some cases, those changes don’t work out quite as well. This writer immediately goes to Netflix’s Locke and Key. Dialling back on the darkness and maturity in the series as the more lighthearted approach threatened to remove the soul of the comic book. In the case of Y: The Last Man, the changes were a good idea.

Not all changes are bad. What you hope is that the adjustments made still make sense to the program. Let’s use Agent 355 for example. In the Y: The Last Man comic book, we first meet her in a foreign country on a U.S. Government mission. Here, she’s still doing clandestine work, just on U.S. soil. We still get to see Agent 355 be the awesome character that she is, she has a similar profession, and things remain close to the source material while also being different enough to allow the adaptation to stand on its own. This was flawlessly done.

It features promising young stars

Since comic book movies and TV shows have become so popular, every actor wants to be part of a franchise. Sometimes, that’s a good thing – fans were very excited to see Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie cast in Eternals. The curse that comes along with this, though, is having higher expectations. We know what they’re capable of from their years of work.

Casting lesser-known actors takes the expectations away. We won’t know how good they are until we see them in action. Of course, we have an A-Lister at the top of the cast in Diane Lane but we also have promising young talent like Olivia Thirlby (Hero Brown), Ben Schnetzer (Yorick Brown), and Ashley Romans (Agent 355) who play some of the most important characters in the comic book. This isn’t close to the first project for any of them but it could become their biggest project very quickly.

Y: The Last Man is a deep story. Every performer will undoubtedly have a moment that can highlight what they’re capable of. Some of these scenes will make us cry tears of joy, others will make our hearts hurt. This is the perfect place for a performer to skyrocket into the hearts and minds of fans and show the world what they’re truly capable of.