Y: The Last Man was met with generally favourable reviews when it debuted on Hulu last year, and after years of struggles to bring Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's comic book series to the screen, it was long overdue. Unfortunately, FX and Hulu abruptly cancelled the series before the first season ended, but poor ratings had nothing to do with that decision.
Instead, the plug was pulled on Y: The Last Man because of delays caused by the pandemic and a change in showrunners. With the clock ticking on the options signed by the show's cast, FX executives chose to save a few million bucks and decided to just end the series rather than sign new deals.
It was a shocking decision and one that upset a lot of fans.
There's nothing to indicate that Y: The Last Man will be saved, and we recently spoke to star Missi Pyle (who played Roxanne) about the cancellation. The actor was talking to us about her role as Cythonna in Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse, but took the time to share her thoughts on the show's abrupt ending.
"Oh my gosh, that was a very devastating piece of news for me. I don’t often get to play these kinds of characters. Because of the sort of work I’ve done, not necessarily in a superhero film, but characters who have a tendency to be a little larger than life," Pyle explained. "There’s Fran from Dodgeball, an alien in Galaxy Quest, or my character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. These big blockbuster movies. I love them, but I’m almost 6 feet tall and I really went into comedy because it was really hard to get cast in genre pieces back in the 90s and early 2000s."
"To get to play this kind of character who has so many complex layers was a lot of fun. She wasn’t who you thought, and episode eight was literally like a movie about Roxanne showing this incredible transformation of who she was and who she becomes," she continued. "It was cancelled just before that one aired and I was like, ‘Really?’
"It’s so fascinating to me to see the losses involved in an acting career or anything in the arts. You just never know how something will be received, but with this one, maybe it was the pandemic. A show about a pandemic in the pandemic…I think people were done with that [Laughs]," the actor concluded. "I was very sad because it was a great group of people involved, primarily women, and it was a nice place to work. I didn’t wear any makeup either which was fun!"
Roxanne was a fun and intriguing character to spend time with in Y: The Last Man, though her story did appear to come to an end in the finale, anyway. It's a shame we won't get to find out how the show's leads' journeys conclude, of course, though we would strongly recommend checking out the comic books to see where Vaughan and Guerra took this sprawling epic.
After so much time was spent trying to bring this property to television only for it to end after a single season, we can't imagine a reboot being on the horizon, but you never know. After all, stranger things have happened, particularly when we're talking about comic book adaptations.
Check back here soon for our full interview with Miss about her villainous Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse role.
Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse is available on Digital, Blu-ray & DVD on May 24. The movie event also premieres on Cartoon Network on May 28 and starts streaming on HBO Max beginning June 28!