Brian K. Vaughan's Y: THE LAST MAN Moving Forward at FX with Pilot Order
More than a year after tapping Michael Green as showrunner and nearly three years after landing at FX, the basic cable network is moving full steam ahead with its adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan's beloved comic book series
Y: The Last Man.
FX on Thursday announced that it has handed out a formal pilot order and enlisted Aida Mashaka Croal (
Jessica Jones, Turn) to serve as co-showrunner alongside Green, with Melina Matsoukas (
Insecure, Master of None, Beyonce: Formation) on board to direct the highly anticipated drama.
Y: The Last Man ranks as one of the most critically acclaimed comic book series of all time. The DC Comics/Vertigo title was first launched in 2002 and revolves around Yorick Brown — the last surviving human with a Y chromosome — and his Capuchin monkey, Ampersand. The series follows escape artist Yorick after a mysterious plague as he sets out to find what might have wiped out the male chromosome. The series, written and created by Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra, ran for 60 issues and has been collected in multiple graphic novels. Here's FX's formal description of the potential series: "All of the men are dead. But one.
Y traverses a world of women — exploring gender, race, class and survival."
Green and Croal will co-showrun and exec produce alongside Matsoukas, Color Force's Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson (FX's
American Crime Story and
Pose), and Vaughan. The team has been working for months on the script, with FX pulling the trigger on the pilot order.
It's been a long and twisty path to the screen for
Y: The Last Man. FX put the adaptation in development in late 2015 after Vaughan reacquired the rights to his franchise following a lengthy waiting period after New Line
scrapped plans to convert the comic book to a feature film. New Line — a corporate sibling to publisher Vertigo — acquired the film rights to the series in 2007 and set David Goyer, Carl Ellsworth and director D.J. Caruso to adapt. The latter wound up walking away from the project after the studio didn't want to produce the saga as a three-film franchise but rather a two-hour stand-alone feature.
In March 2012,
Jericho's Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia were in final negotiations to take on the property with J.C. Spink, Chris Bender and Goyer producing, and Mason Novick and Jake Weiner set as executive producers. The latter fell apart in September 2014 when Vaughan announced that the rights were in the process of reverting back to him and the movie was dead. "We wanted to tell a complete story … but not the whole story," Vaughan said at the time, noting that he had hoped that "in success, we could get tell the rest of our serialized adventure."
FX's
Y marks Vaughan's latest TV foray after Hulu's take on his beloved Marvel comic
Runaways and CBS'
Under the Dome (which he developed for Showtime and ultimately
departed following its freshman season on CBS) and
Lost. He's currently writing Image Comics' critical hit
Saga.
Green most recently made headlines after he and co-showrunner Bryan Fuller
parted ways with Starz and producers Fremantle Media on season two of
American Gods, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's beloved book.
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