The Last Man On Earth

9pm, Dave

“The Last Man Alive … Is Not Alone!” So ran the tagline for The Omega Man, the 1971 Charlton Heston movie that stands as, if not the most faithful, certainly the funkiest adaptation of Robert Matheson’s brilliant 1954 sci-fi novel, I Am Legend.

While no one has yet got it right, Matheson’s book has been the gift that keeps giving for anyone – everyone – looking to make heavily allegorical post-apocalyptic survival dramas.

It was finally filmed under its own title in 2007 as an expensive Will Smith waste of time, but the most accurate movie remains 1964’s The Last Man On Earth, a surprisingly bleak Vincent Price outing which in turn heavily influenced Night Of The Living Dead and, therefore, every other Year Zero plague fiction since, through to The Walking Dead.

There are no living dead in the new American sitcom The Last Man On Earth, but Matheson’s influence remains.

Once again, a virus has wiped out the entire human race – all except this one guy.

It is 2020, and our sole survivor is one Phil Miller (played by the show’s co-creator, Saturday Night Live veteran Will Forte), who we first encounter driving through the deserted cities of the United States, half-heartedly looking for anyone else still alive, before giving it up and heading home to Tucson, Arizona.

Why fate has singled him out as The One to endure remains mysterious, but it’s not a mystery Phil shows much interest in investigating.

Instead – once he’s moved from his cruddy apartment into a ritzy mansion, plundered museums for Van Goghs to hang on the walls, and stocked up on junk food, alcohol and pornography – he whiles away the months slumping, drinking, eating, vegging out and wishing he could meet a good-looking girl. Which, you soon begin to realise, is probably exactly how he spent his days before Armageddon, anyway.

A born slacker, the closest he comes to forging survival skills is cutting a hole in the backyard diving board, so he can sit there taking dumps into the swimming pool, having already filled up the toilets in the house.

Slowly, he then begins slipping into suicidal loneliness.

The Dave channel is showing the first two episodes as a double bill, so it’s not giving much away to reveal a twist is looming: once again, The Last Man Alive… Is Not Alone!

From Episode Two, the series begins moving off in its own clever direction, as an intense but shaggy and snarky riff on relationships – a good alternative title might be Hell Is Other People.

Beneath the hip, bearded indie veneer, there’s sitcom stuff here which is as old as The Flintstones, but in a good way.

It’s a smart, likeable show, driven by Forte’s often-unlikeable scratchy loser, and it leaves you wanting to find out how things will turn out.

All the same, I wish that they had kept the last-man-on-Earth sequence running for just a little longer.

As with Charlton Heston tooling around an empty Los Angeles in his convertible, listening to his eight-track and watching the same movie over and over again – or, for that matter, little Wall-E, going through the litter in the Pixar classic – the moments that linger longest are the early scenes of our reluctant hero left alone on the quiet Earth, sifting the detritus of our fallen culture, all the bewildering stuff we surround ourselves with to kill time and distract from the question of why we bother.

The Omega Man’s going into the DVD player tonight.