Preacher Show Producers Could Have Pursued Y: The Last Man Series Instead
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Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher is one of my favorite comic series of all time, a sprawling cross-country road trip involving vampires, serial killers, disturbing kinks, a guy accurately nicknamed named “Arseface,” some truly awful rednecks, and a former man of God now determined to hold the deity responsible for the mess he’s let his creation become. Preacher has been in development as a movie for years — a terrible idea in my opinion, as it would work much better as a TV series. Thankfully, that’s exactly what’s going to happen, as it was announced this past February that Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Sam Caitlin are adapting the comic for AMC. But if the trio’s Preacher dreams hadn’t come together, they would have tried to bring another acclaimed comic to the small screen: Y: The Last Man.
Just like Preacher, Y: The Last Man has been in development for a dog’s age, and again, as a movie. It’s also a property that lends itself much more naturally to a TV series, as there isn’t really a core narrative that would collapse well into a brief two-hour film. Created by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, Y is the story of Yorick Brown, the last man alive after a mysterious event kills off all the other Y chromosome bearers on the planet — other than Yorick’s monkey, Ampersand. Yorick sets off on an epic journey around the world, first ostensibly to track down his girlfriend, but eventually embracing the much more ambitious goal of figuring out what the hell happened to all the men, and if there’s a way to fix it.
While promoting their new movie Neighbors, producers Goldberg and Weaver told Collider that, had the Preacher project fallen through, they would have set their sights on Y. Last we’d heard, Y was mired in development hell at New Line, with the rights about to revert to Vaughan and Guerra. “Y: The Last Man as a feature is ludicrous,” said Goldberg. “It’s perfectly made to be a TV show.” Weaver countered that he thought the feature script was actually pretty good, but I have to agree with Goldberg. Y: The Last Man is very much a story that’s about the journey far more than it is the destination, and a movie would have to strip it down to bare bones to fit a two-hour run time, something that would inherently leave behind much of what made the comic so great. The expansive breathing room of a TV series, however, would suit the narrative perfectly, as demonstrated by shows such as HBO’s Game of Thrones and AMC’s own mega-hit The Walking Dead.
With the entertainment landscape changing rapidly thanks to the proliferation of cable channels jumping aboard the scripted programming bandwagon, not to mention game-changers such as Netflix and Amazon’s original content development, hopefully Y: The Last Man will find a TV home sometime soon. But either way, can we get somebody to work on Transmetropolitan already?
