I have one dumb friend who refuses to admit The Lego Movie is great; he's the same dumb friend who refuses to admit that 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street are great, and while I haven't been able to bring myself to talk to him about Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Clone High, I'm sure he'd be a contrarian jackass about those things, too. THE REST OF US, HOWEVER, can agree that writer/directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are apparently fucking bulletproof geniuses—and that extends to the new TV series they're producing, Will Forte's The Last Man on Earth, in which Will Forte plays... ah... the... last... man on Earth. Lord and Miller also directed the first two episodes, and man, they're fantastic—funny and melancholy and clever and goofy. (Also, weirdly pretty to look at.) The show apparently "aired" on "television" on Sunday night; I watched those first two episodes last night, since FOX put them up for free on iTunes. Here's a clip that I just rewatched twice:
(This used to be an embed but I put a link here instead because the goddamn video autoplayed, turns out. WHO IS STILL MAKING VIDEOS PLAY AUTOMATICALLY, AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST HUMANITY)
The Last Man on Earth doesn't feel like a network comedy—the pacing is careful, the jokes can be disarming—and given that every time I get attached to a network comedy bad things tend to happen (even as The Big Bang Theory continues to fumble and flail into billion-dollar success week every week), Last Man on Earth has me... nervous. Like, delighted, and trying not to be cynical, but also nervous, because things this good rarely last on network TV. Hell, they usually never even show on network TV.
So yes: Watch this, please, partly because I bet you'll like it, but mostly so that it keeps going forever* and so I can keep watching it forever. The first two episodes are free on iTunes, or you can just watch them here.
*(so long as it doesn't get in the way of Forte doing MacGruber 2, a possibly imaginary motion picture that I think about every morning as soon as I wake up and every night as I am falling asleep**)
