Y: The Last Man has premiered on FX on Hulu, and the show’s official Rotten Tomatoes score has subsequently been revealed. Y: The Last Man currently holds a 68% score on RT, with twenty-five critics scores having been submitted (at the time of writing this). In our own Comicbook.com review, Patrick Cavanaugh said that “the wait for Y: The Last Man to be seen in live-action has been worth it, as shows like Legion, Preacher, and Watchmen have offered much more mature and complex interpretations of its source materials when previous years likely would have seen Y be a much more literal translation.”
However, The Wrap doesn’t seem to agree that Y: The Last Man goes far enough to speak to the modern context this adaptation is airing in:
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“Unfortunately, this series doesn’t do enough to modernize questions from the original text. A binary world never existed, but for many years the majority moved as if the only gender options were male or female. “Y: The Last Man” introduces trans men to the story where the comic book did not. Characters discuss the facts of how Y chromosomes don’t present solely in cisgendered men. While this progression toward inclusion is better than none, it leaves trans, innersex and nonbinary individuals in the margins as topics of discussion and not living human beings.”
Collider thinks that while occasionally “the show can’t escape slipping into the grim patterns… almost like generic disaster porn at times,” it nonetheless “feels fresh more often than not, with a number of compelling, haunting, scary, or even sometimes genuinely funny sequences to be found in each episode.”
The Daily Beast thinks that while the Y: The Last Man series is perfectly fine, it’s just not a fully fitting oe to the groundbreaking comic:
“Because the budgets for these products aren’t huge, corners are cut in lighting and action sequences to the point where it’s very hard not to look and sound like a Netflix adaptation project like Umbrella Academy or the aforementioned Jessica Jones. Y: The Last Man is a perfectly serviceable political thriller, but the comic-book trappings that really made the panels sing just aren’t present here.”
Decider counters with the idea that Y: The Last Man actually gets really good and compelling – if you give it the time and room to develop: “It’s a series with a whole that is far more fascinating than its slow-paced parts. If you give it the space of a few episodes, this new drama promises great things.”
Y: The Last Man is now streaming on Hulu.
