Y: The Last Man's first darkly statistical teaser crunches numbers on a world without men

The path to adapting Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra's Vertigo maxiseries Y: The Last Man has been a long one. But now it appears the live-action series on FX is actually happening, as the first teaser for the series just dropped, painting a dismal future that may well be worth visiting.  

Like Vaughn and Guerra's 2002 post-apocalyptic comic, the upcoming series revolves around the central conceit that pretty much every living mammal with a Y chromosome has died. That's a lot of men, leaving open a lot of positions of power, as the trailer darkly makes clear.

Check it out:

In the series, the sole survivors of this man-eating plague are Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzner) and his pet male monkey, Ampersand. Joined by Agent 355 (Ashley Romans), Yorick has to figure out why he was spared, while also trying to stay alive as what remains of the world learns of his existence. With humanity on the brink of extinction, he's something of a hot commodity. 

As previously mentioned, adapting Y has been something of a task. Originally, it was planned to be a feature film, though it never happened despite multiple scripts, one of which was written by Vaughn himself and was said to have considerably departed from the source material. At the time, future Shazam! Zachary Levi was interested in starring as Yorick after then-Transformers star Shia Lebeouf opted out, though nothing ever came of this and the project was eventually shelved. 

The journey to TV was apparently just as troublesome. Y's series was originally reported back in 2015, with showrunning duties eventually falling to Eliza Clark after Michael Green of American Gods fame and Aida Mashaka Croal backed out. Barry Keoghan had signed on as Yorick in 2018, with Captain Marvel's Lashana Lynch playing 355. Keoghan departed the show in 2020, as did Lynch, due to scheduling conflicts (Keoghan is starring in November's Marvel's Eternals as Druig; and Lynch is Nomi in October's oft-delayed James Bond film No Time to Die). 

Y: The Last Man will premiere Sept. 13 on FX, and hits Hulu the following day.