Y: The Last Man may finally be a TV show

After more than 10 years of development hell, Y: The Last Man is closer to the screen than ever before. FX has ordered a pilot for an adaptation of the blockbuster comic series, simply titled Y, from producer/writer Michael Green (American Gods, Logan, Bladerunner 2049).

If the pilot is greenlit for a series, Green will co-run with Melina Matsoukas (Insecure, Master of None), and Matsoukas will also direct the pilot. Y: The Last Man writer Brian K. Vaughan will executive produce.

Running for 60 issues from 2002 until 2008, Y: The Last Man is Brian K. Vaughan’s longest-running comic, and the creator is well known for crafting epic narratives. The core of its story is well summed up by FX’s press release: “All of the men are dead. But one. Based on the DC comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, Y traverses a world of women — exploring gender, race, class and survival.”

The comic centered around the travels of Yorick Brown and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, who are inexplicably the only male mammals to survive a gobal plague of biblical proportions. Yorick’s biology becomes the key to saving humanity from extinction within a generation, and other major plot threads of the series concern Israeli army commandos, secret agents, dying astronauts and Amazon-worshipping militant groups.

Y: The Last Man is one of the biggest recent successes of DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, and its creators, Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra, retain control of the rights to it. Those rights were first picked up by New Line Cinema in 2007 for a potential film, which went through several drafts, directors and trilogy-vs-stand-alone plans without ever going into production. With no movie in the works, the rights reverted to Vaughan and Guerra in 2014.

FX picked up the rights in 2015, and announced that Michael Green was attached to showrun a television adaptation in 2016. The announcement of a pilot is a significant step for the production — it means we just might see it on TV sometime soon.