Fox’s Last Man on Earth starring Will Forte was a great show that unfortunately wasn’t able to find enough of an audience before the network decided to pull the plug. Unfortunately, while Brooklyn 99 and Lucifer were able to survive FOX cancellations and find new life elsewhere, Last Man did not. What makes things even worse is that the show ended on a major cliffhanger. The good news is that we won’t be wondering what was supposed to happen next if the show hadn’t been canceled. In a new interview, Will Forte has spilled the beans on what fans could have expected to see in Season 5.
“The way that we would have handled these people — basically they had been in this bunker and they went down when the virus had first started. 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.’ Then they see a bunch of stragglers — us. And we represent a real threat to them, because they’d thought everything was dead, so they quarantine us.
“And we eventually communicate with them a little bit. They get comfortable with us. They’re very nice people. They look scary but they end up being nice people. They’re probably a couple famous people in there hopefully, or at least one. Somebody, I don’t know. Somebody’s acting. Somebody’s the main person. And eventually we’d all get comfortable with each other, and they would kind of let one person out. They wouldn’t be scared anymore.”
“But then we are immune to the virus but we’re carriers. And so we would infect them and they’d die like wildfire. And then we’re back to just us. And maybe one famous person we could talk into staying around. So that would have been it. That arc would have lasted four or five episodes. At the very end we were hearing, ‘Oh they’re going to bring you back for ten episodes so you can finish up.’ Because to be honest, I told you about the schedule being just so insane and I was thinking, Oh, ten episodes sounds great. It sounds like a doable amount that I won’t go crazy with. So we would have tried to figure out how we would have rushed to the ending.”
Even though the show wasn’t able to wrap itself up, one thing is for sure. Forte is very proud of what they accomplished:
“I am very proud of the show and I love it with all my heart. Certainly there are things where you are striving to do something and make this deeper message that sometimes you don’t hit the way that you want to. But I do feel like we created a cast of characters that loved each other as people off camera, and I think that came across on camera. I am just really proud of the show. The thing I am really proud of is the fact that we were just able to bounce through so many different tones. That moment where Mary Steenburgen reveals to Kristen Schaal that she used to have a kid and the kid died is an incredible acting moment. To be able to have the show go to places like that, I am really proud that our writers were able to create a show where you can mess around so much and then at the same time do millions of fart jokes.”