The story of Yorick Brown will remain unfinished (for now?): Y: The Last Man has been cancelled at FX on Hulu, executive producer Eliza Clark announced via Twitter on Sunday.
“We have learned that we will not be moving forward with FX on Hulu for Season 2 of Y: The Last Man,” Clark wrote. “I have never in my life been more committed to a story, and there is so much more left to tell… It is the most collaborative, creatively fulfilling and beautiful thing I have ever been a part of. We don’t want it to end.”
Although the series will not continue at the streamer, Clark expressed hope that the show will find a new outlet. “FX has been an amazing partner. We have loved working with them, and we’re sad [the show] is not moving forward at FX on Hulu,” Clark added. “But we know that someone else is going to be very lucky to have this team and this story… We are committed to finding Y its next home.”
Actress Amber Tamblyn, who plays Kimberly Campbell Cunningham, also took to Twitter to comment on the unfortunate news. “While I’m disappointed, I know this extraordinary show that has so much to say will find a great new home soon. Looking forward to the next chapter. If you’re with me, let the world know. #YLivesOn”
Adapted from the comic book of the same name by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, Y: The Last Man followed what happened after “a cataclysmic event decimates all but one cisgender male, Yorick Brown (Warcraft‘s Ben Schnetzer), and his pet monkey,” according to the show’s official description. The series followed the survivors of this brand new world as they struggled to cope with their new existence in hope of restoring what was lost and building something better.
“This is not the first time in twenty years I’ve seen Yorick & co. escape the seemingly inescapable!” Vaughan wrote on Instagram. “I love this show, and I’m very hopeful Y will find a new home, not just because it happens to employ more extraordinary women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community — both in front of and behind the camera — than any project I’ve ever been a part of, but because they’ve made something spectacular, the kind of thoughtful, contemporary, fearless evolution of the comic that @pia.guerra and I always wanted.”
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The rest of the cast includes Diane Lane (House of Cards), Juliana Canfield (Succession), Elliot Fletcher (The Fosters), Olivia Thirlby (Juno), Ashley Romans (NOS4A2) and Marin Ireland (The Umbrella Academy).
The remaining Season 1 episodes will continue to drop on Mondays via FX on Hulu, with the season finale set to begin streaming Nov. 1.
TVLine’s Streaming Scorecard has been updated to reflect the news.
Disappointed that the plug was pulled on Yorick? Let us know your thoughts on the cancellation in the Comments.
well this was fast.
but it is disney after all.
also a ip that not well know to most people
Very fast. The show was in development literally forever, though. Maybe it was a troubled production, and then when it wasn’t a breakout hit, they decided to pull the plug rather than keep throwing good money after bad.
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I never watched it. Read the comic, hated the ending, and that was enough for me.
Yeah I was hoping the show would change the ending when ever it ended it was awful but th|y didn’t promote it enough in my opinion
I heard the commercial 100 times a day with James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World. Drove me nuts. It was promoted enough imo.
It was not at all “literally” forever because it would be still in development and would have never become a show. You can say “like forever”, not “literally”.
Obviously it was not in development for literally forever.
Literally get over yourself.
Not figuratively literally.
Literally literally.
Jeez. Unloosen your tie, I think it’s restricting the flow of blood to your brain and causing you to see red. And do keep me appraised if that helps.
It’s been used that way for over 300 years by masters of the language.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-literally
This was the only think i was watching on Hulu… I guess i can cancel another streamer now.
Yikes! In the age of all things comic book, I figured it would at least get a second season.
In the age of all things comic book, this show (while admittedly needing to do so to bring it up to current times) strayed so far from the original comic by making it so much more about everyone else BUT Yorick it had already caused a lot of the original fan base to not have much interest. The whole controversy over trans representation didn’t help because THAT started to become what the show was about, if they were there and how they would be perceived.
When again, neither the comic, nor the overall premise of the show had anything to do with them.
And you have to be careful over just how much you stray from the source material to still be able to get everyone who knows it AND new people.
This show went such a different way calling it Y: The Last Man almost seemed like an insult.
But I also think it was just a subject to the streaming deluge and got lost in the shuffle.
This was easy to see coming. Marketing absolutely killed this show. It got tons of pub but it seemed almost every interview was about how it was going to treat its trans characters rather then the main characters. I mean, “a cataclysmic event decimates all but one cisgender male, Yorick Brown (Warcraft‘s Ben Schnetzer), and his pet monkey,” it’s certainly something they could be covered in the scope of the story, and maybe more delicately than the original 20 year old comic did. But they made it sound like it was more about the gender spectrum than a world now of just women and the one man who navigated through it. Probably turned fans of the comics and those who thought it would just be preachy off. It had more hype than anything this season but once it was released no one was talking about it.
This! Way too many unnecessary changes, too much focus on everybody (many new filler characters) but the main three, and replacing the true villain of the series with Ivanka Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I got the feeling that my favorite storyline “One Small Step” wouldn’t happen at all.
Now that makes me furious, a good show and now it’s like why finish watching it. Very frustrating
I loved this show
This is so annoying. Nothing gets a fair chance these days. I mean the season isn’t even done airing, so I’m sure they could’ve waited a few months post finale and then let it find it’s audience. I’m bummed about this.
It probably didnt have enough in the way of an audience to justify the cost for Hulu. Either that or there’s a complete disaster behind the scenes preventing it from continuing.
Don’t forget it also goes straight to Disney+Star in places. If it can’t get a big enough audience that way… Ouch.
Awww, man. I don’t have Hulu, but was anticipating catching up with it at some future date.
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This is the down side of properties being segregated on different streaming services rather than widely accessible. It’s just not possible to subscribe to them all.
Well that figures, I had just started watching it.
I liked the pilot, liked episodes 2-4 less, liked episode 5 a little more than the prior three. However, I think 6 & 7 were the best episodes yet. But shows that usually take half a season to get good these days is too late. If it was stronger in the beginning, I think it would’ve made it.
Not unexpected.
Show was as bland as a wet noodle, instead of filling the ranks with women for whatever reason , pick the right people for the job.
Instead of wasting all the season budget with open sets should have started small instead. You can tell it was poorly led, not to mention that neither yorick or ampersand ever worked in tandem.
Showrunners probably thought it was going to be like ross and marcel duo.
That was fast…
Big fan of the comics. Not so much the show. I’ve been watching and trying but I just couldn’t get into it. It’s very different from the comic and sadly not in a good way.
I think the whole trans controversy did not help things. The original comic did mention trans people but did not focus on them. I think it would have been better if this had been made into a movie back in the 2000’s.
What you are saying is, essentially, it would’ve been better if they’d mentioned a trans person BUT not included one in the main or supporting cast. How inclusive of you!
Transgender people should be given representation in film, tv, etc. Trans people have been around a long time – but only recently been given the opportunity to step forward and get roles that portray them accurately & by trans people themselves.
Get used to Trans people being shown on TV & Movies. We aren’t going to be silenced or be forced to hide in the shadows because of intolerance.
Well, when you stray so far from the source material and what made the comic great in the first place, where it can get in a position to be adapted for television, then high Jack the show to get across your personal agenda, you alienate the fans that supported the book in the first place.
I bet you’ve never read an issue of the comic, you can’t high jack a beloved comic and change it to the point its unrecognizable to the fan base and expect it to succeed, you have to be Suttle when you change things or you get this, cancelations and no one wins, or better yet create something original to get your story across and not something known with a fan base already and try to do a switcheroo because your not talented enough to create something original.
If producers worry about what “the fans that supported the book in the first place” cared about, no comic book series would last all that long.
Nowadays, when a comic book sells 200,000 copies, it’s a hit. Sales in the seven figures are almost unheard of these days. And yet, a TV show that only gets the same number of viewers as a hit comic book will be canceled by the first commercial break.
Could they have brought the property up to date in a way that didn’t blunt the story? Maybe. Should they have? I don’t know. But nobody making a TV show or movie is all that concerned with alienating the fans of the original, because quite honestly, there aren’t enough of them to matter.
And I write the above as a fan of both comics in general and “Y” in particular.
Tons of people read comic book stories in this day and age without buying actual comic books. In fact, the percentage of the overall audience for a comic book story that buys actual comic books is small. If we took a poll of all the people who are saying they read the series on these comments, and asked if they bought a single issue of the series in comic book format, I bet the answer would be zero. And also, anyway, the people who’ve “read the book,” where the source material is a comic book or just a regular book, become what’s known as “opinion leaders” in the community of people interested in potentially checking out the series. That’s a social sciences/psychology concept. Google it to learn more about how these things work. The short answer is, yes, pleasing the people who’ve “read the book” matters very much to the success of a series, no matter how comparatively few of them there are compared to the desired audience total.
Your poll would be wrong. Bought every issue of the comic when it was monthly and had it on my subscription list.
While generally that’s 100% true, if you make something the fan base doesn’t like, then you’ve got two problems. First, you lose all good word of mouth, which means something in the instant internet age. If Joe and Jill Average are seeing the people who like this say it stinks, why should they tune in? And second, which is a thing Marvel has really gotten right, there was a reason that fanbase really liked the property. And if you change what they liked then it’s not being shown to all these other people. And they would probably like the same thing, they just haven’t been exposed to it. Marvel changes some details but sticks to what people love about their characters and stories and just exposes what comic book lovers have always loved to a wider audience. And lo and behold, people who aren’t deep into comics actually like a lot of the same things. It’s when you don’t trust your properties to be popular to a wide audience and change what made them great is when you usually fail.
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I mean, again, you’re not wrong. Y is a pretty, not obscure, but not a mainstream “Superman” type book. Not even a Guardians of the Galaxy at least it’s a Marvel comic property. But so was the Walking Dead, and now AMC is basically the Walking Dead network. (For the worse, mind you, but there you go).
That’s not actually what she said, but I’m guessing you didn’t watch the show anyway.
That’s not what they said. That’s what you said.
That demographic is actually overrepresented atm (vs % of population), but if it helps anyone… great!
You could learn to read better, though.
Y: The Last Man was published by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, which is owned by Warner. HBO Max find an arrangement to bring it to the streamer.
This is released as a Star Plus original everywhere else in the world, I doubt Disney is gonna allow them to sell it to a different streaming, specially since Star Plus has been doing subpar numbers in Latin America due to their strategy to put it as a separate (and extremely expensive compared to HBO and Prime Video) streaming service.
I’ve really been enjoying this show, even though I didn’t know it had actually launched til episode 5 was out – I even searched on Hulu and it didn’t come up. I’m real curious why the network is so quickly cutting this show before it even finishes airing.
I really like Ben Schnetzer but I kept thinking the show needs more of him. It is named after him, and I want to see him interact with with more than just 355, who is hampered by all the secrecy surrounding her actual intentions. Yorick needs more exploration and less stupidity – keep the mask on!
Thirlby and Amber Tamblyn are both great and playing very interesting characters. I don’t like the stupid secrets Diane Lane has to keep, but the plotline of keeping the world running is such fertile ground it definitely deserves more time.
Also – does Schnetzer have a lisp in other things? I didn’t notice it at first but then it’s all I heard.
To be honest, in the comic Yorick keeps on presenting himself by pulling his mask off and what not as well. 355 gets quite annoyed by it too, but it all ends up in a retrospective character development plot for Yorick, that I don’t think the TV series will come around to adapt.
Not surprised. Not sad.
I guess I’m a little disappointed, but not much. I’ve watched the first 3 episodes, but then the fall TV season really started and well, I’ve watched that stuff instead of watching this each week. I was going to catch up, but really seems pointless now.
Big fan of Brian K. Vaghan’s comic work, but this show did not capture his style at all. Where was the fun? If any network buys up his Saga series, they better have the budget and creativity to do it justice, cause they sure didn’t here.
Claiming it was the trans storyline that killed Y: The Last Man is a really weird take, since there wasn’t much about that yet in the two or three episodes I watched, and the show was already so tedious and flat that I couldn’t justify continuing to watch it.
I bet most viewers who tuned out didn’t even make it that far, so while it seems to be some sort of annoyingly eternal talking point these days to blame all sorts of stuff on trans people (thanks, Rowling and Chappelle), this show was already doomed no matter what storylines or issues they played up in later episodes.
How did Rowling put blame on trans people by just stating scientific facts?
Eh, I’m sure there are some, but I don’t think most people are blaming trans inclusion for the cancellation. I think they’re saying that all the marketing leading up to the show talked about it so much that it seemed like it was the major theme of the show, which didn’t reflect the comic at all. (And maybe not the show either). And that turned people off. Not having sat in on the interviews can’t say if the media was pushing it or they were volunteering it. The fact that it took the joy and fun out of the comic too didn’t help for those who did watch.
Wasn’t one of the main goals of Saga to make something that’s as un-adaptable to movies and/or TV as possible?
Not that I wouldn’t want to see them try… :)
Guess all that talk about gender didn’t help after all. Goodbye “Y: not the last man but the last cisgender individual with the Y cromosome because there are a lot of men left, even Diane Lane said so”.
DIsappointed. But I will hold out hope like the creators and cast that some other streamer will pick it up. Sooner rather than later before the cast gets other jobs.
The show had an interesting premise but by episode 3 it had lost its way and went down hill. The black woman CIA left the story, the president stuff was irrelevant, and now a psycho cop running a commune from a depot!!! Bye.
Damn it. My weekend wasted. I binged watched it this weekend. Bummer….
Just pick up the comic instead. 😉
My biggest problem with this show and a lot of these dystopian shows, is I don’t believe in the world reverting to tribalism instantly when a ‘event’ occurs.
And for this show, The whole Trans storyline took over the show. I have no problem with the Trans story that was being told, but it is not supposed to be the main storyline. Then on top of it all, it was just slow and boring. Just disappointing overall.
I don’t understand stand in era where people admittedly hate watch Grey’s Anatomy and the many, many, many CBS shows having to do with crime but in different locations and actors. Branch out, there are so genuinely funning things out there. Isn’t life stressful enough to go home and watch for “fun”?