Here’s What ‘The Last Man On Earth’ Ending Would Have Been If The Show Hadn’t Been Cancelled
By Ben Pearson/July 31, 2018 4:30 pm EST
Like Forte himself, The Last Man on Earth was an odd, lovable comedy full of goofy characters and genuine heart. The series began with Forte’s character, Phil Tandy Miller, thinking that he was the last human being alive on the planet after a devastating virus killed a majority of the population, but as the first season went on, he learned that he was not the lone survivor. The series shifted from being about the wacky antics someone would do to stave off loneliness to being about how to keep a healthy community alive during trying times. And in the midst of it all, the show balanced laugh-out-loud jokes with moments of reflection and moving character interactions. While it fully embraced its sitcom form, there somehow wasn’t anything else on TV quite like it.
Spoilers for the show’s ending ahead.
Here’s where Forte’s explanation of his intended finale comes in:
And we eventually communicate with them a little bit. They get comfortable with us. They’re very nice people. They look scary but they end up being nice people. They’re probably a couple famous people in there hopefully, or at least one. Somebody, I don’t know. Somebody’s acting. Somebody’s the main person. And eventually we’d all get comfortable with each other, and they would kind of let one person out. They wouldn’t be scared anymore.
“…there’s so many smart people in that [writers’] room, we would have found something that would have been fitting for the audience. But the way that we would have handled these [masked] people — basically they had been in this bunker and they went down when the virus had first started. They had some kind of medical expert or scientist who knew, ‘At this certain point, the virus will be dormant. You’ll be safe to get back out.’ Then they see a bunch of stragglers — us. And we represent a real threat to them, because they’d thought everything was dead, so they quarantine us.
But then we are immune to the virus but we’re carriers. And so we would infect them and they’d die like wildfire. And then we’re back to just us. And maybe one famous person we could talk into staying around. So that would have been it.”
Forte explained that this would have happened over the course of four or five episodes, because there were some rumblings that the show could have been renewed for ten episodes to close the whole thing out. That ended up not happening, but I’m glad The Last Man on Earth had the chance to exist for as long as it did and I hope people still discover its weird comedic sensibilities even if it’s over for good.
