7) The Last Man on Earth –Â R.I.P. Phil Miller
Before The Last Man on Earth had enough cast members to perform its own off-broadway rendition of Rent, the weird little Fox sitcom was about one down-on-his-luck schmuck named Phil Miller, the last guy on the planet. The show’s pilot is subsequently a slight revelation in its unorthodox singular nature of cathartic wish fullfilment: Phil bowls for fish tanks instead of pins, fills a kiddie pool with margarita mix and sprinkles its edges with salt, cuts a hole into a diving board when his in-home plumbing system goes south, and you can imagine the rest.
It’s endearing stuff, full of appropriate pathos in Will Forte’s desperate attempt to experience people again (“Hello God, first of all apologies for all the recent masturbation. But that’s gotta be on you”), and it comes to a head in his suicide attempt at the pilot’s end. After a flirtation attempt with a cute mannequin comes to a disastrous end, Phil resigns to check out by crashing into a large rock. As Mark Mothersbaugh’s upbeat-yet-somber score rises, Phil’s huge pickup truck barrels to his final resting place.
For a few scary moments, The Last Man on Earth flirts with a dead serious denouement (hampered slightly by the fact that the pilot was a double-header premiere), bookending an odd, experimental 22 minutes of TV in a way that feels appropriate in its one-two punch of darkness and levity. Then Phil sees a beacon of smoke, stumbles onto a bra hanging from a clothesline, and discovers that the name of his show is carrying the baton of Cougar Town in its amusing-but-frustrating falsity.
Still, Phil’s drive represents the show’s opening salvo thesis statement: it was going to be weird, it was going to be funny, it was going to be sad, and it wasn’t going to be for everyone.
