There's no shortage of shows that get canceled way before their given the chance to truly shine. Netflix is notorious for canceling shows after one season on their streaming platform. However, television networks are far more brutal when it comes to giving a series the ax. This has a lot to do with the way they produce multiple shows simultaneously and throw them at audiences to see what sticks. Networks also have access to a lot more information about viewership and have advertisers to bow to. This seems to be one of the biggest factors involved with FOX's decision to cancel Will Forte's The Last Man On Earth in 2018.
The Last Man On Earth premiered in 2015 on FOX and was the brainchild of Saturday Night Live alumnus Will Forte. With the help of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the series became an immediate cult classic. Still, the show was a very odd career move for Will. Here's why he did it...
Why Will Forte Made The Last Man On Earth
Prior to launching The Last Man On Earth, Will Forte had gone through a career revamp of sorts. While he was best known for his work on SNL, he soon became a critically acclaimed dramatic actor thanks to his work in the film Nebraska. The Last Man On Earth was both a comedy and a drama. But a series about the (apparent) lone survivor of a global pandemic was a risk. Not just for a network that tends to rely on back and forth between actors, but also for Will himself who had to carry the weight of the premise entirely alone.
"I don’t do a lot of strategizing, career-wise," Will Forte said about the creation of The Last Man On Earth during a 2015 interview with Vulture. "I was approached by Chris and Phil, the guys who did The Lego Movie, they gave me my first job on Clone High. We’ve been friends forever, and they asked me if I wanted to write something with them. I came into this thinking of it as a writing project and nothing more. And then as we started developing it, I just fell in love with the concept and the character, and it was hard to think about giving it away."
"We initially saw it as more of a cable thing. But once we went to pitch the idea, the networks were just as interested, and ultimately the studio convinced us that Fox was the right place for it," Will continued. "I think we were initially nervous about it ‘cause it seemed so different. We were nervous that we would go in there and all these promises [that] were made about wanting to do something different wouldn’t be lived up to. But once we got in there, we were supported all along the way, and they let us make the show that we wanted to make. They didn’t make us make a pilot. We knew where the character was leading, and so it really helped inform the character."
Will fell hard for The Last Man On Earth. Despite working seven days a week for a minimum of 12 hours a day as an actor, writer, and showrunner, the SNL star wasn't ready to call it quits.
Why Last Man On Earth Was Canceled And Will It Get A Revival?
Many fans were disappointed that Last Man On Earth wasn't given a proper ending. Unlike other canceled shows, Last Man On Earth was given the ax before the creators could develop a proper conclusion. Therefore, fans were left with a ton of questions surrounding the final images at the end of the fourth and final season. The truth is, the possibility of Last Man On Earth getting a revival is almost non-existent. But Will did reveal what he thought he would have done with the group of gas-mask-wearing survivors who confront his character at the end of season four.
"[These people] went down [into the bunker] when the virus had first started," Will Forte said on a podcast from Vulture. "They had some kind of medical expert or scientist who knew, 'At this certain point, the virus will be dormant. You’ll be safe to get back out,' and they had reached that point. Then they see a bunch of stragglers — us — and we represent a real threat to them, because they thought [everyone] was dead, so they quarantine us. We eventually communicate with them a little bit [and] they get comfortable with us. They look scary but they end up being nice people."
Still, Will claimed that he and his team didn't have a proper ending for the show mapped out. And this may have been a contributing factor to why the show was canceled. Even though the show had consistently positive reviews, some critics (such as at HuffPost and The NY Daily News) worried that the show's premise started to run its course after the pilot.
It's somewhat unclear why exactly FOX decided to cancel Last Man On Earth, but it appears as though a steady ratings decline was the main contributing factor.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTErZ%2Bippeoe6S7zGiroZ1dp7Kiv86nZLChnKF6p7vRrZxmpZGZsm64wKyrZqWRo3qwuoyemKusmGKur7CMsJ%2ByZZmperit0maamqaTmrmmsI4%3D