Our look inside the Last Man on Earth writers' room continues with season 2 episodes 5 and 6.
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The cricket food Carol makes here is deeply unnerving.
Director Jason Woliner has kind of been your ace in the hole this season, hasnt he?
Hes gotten a lot of the more complicated set pieces from the series and always sticks the landing.
Jason shot a couple for us last year and he was just such a great mesh with our show.
We booked him for as many as we could get this year.
Its a real tough job, directing TV comedy.
Weve been very lucky with our directors.
Peter Attencio was another last year, who is now too busy for us.
To be honest, we didnt even brainstorm on it much.
We didnt sit around saying, Okay, whats Gails problem?
And then it was like, Well whats funny about her being the doctor?
Hmm, probably that wine in her hand.
I feel like, on our show, the character development is very much driven by visuals.
Like January Jones just looks really good with a gun.
So we run with that and Melissa becomes the badass.
And theres some really great Melissa downslide stuff coming towards the end of the season.
Gails drinking pretty constantly at this point.
Should we assume that this is fallout from what happened with Gordon?
Yeah, like I hinted at above, something about her character just seemed right with the wine.
Maybe its the southern drawl and that Tennessee Williams vibe.
Emily Spivey kind of channels Gail and had a lot to do with the formation of that character.
So Melissa cuts her hand in this episode.
Was this ever on the table?
Or merely misdirect for whats coming?
But sadly, I dont think we ever considered Melissas injury getting big.
Was it always this bacon incident to bring Tandy and Todd back together?
Did you guys weigh other options, or did it all come down to food in the end?
We had been talking about frozen food since last year.
And Tandys looking at this old magazine and he sees a frozen pizza in the photo.
And that, Im afraid, is theCommunityexperience coming out of me.
Thats a pretty typical start for aCommunitystory, but notLast Man.
I must have pitched that 25 times and it never got any traction.
But the idea of a working freezer had some staying power, so it morphed into this bacon idea.
It could have gone any number of ways.
But a shared secret seemed to win the day.
A shared secret is a pretty great way to repair a relationship.
Im filing that away for future me when Im stuck on a story.
Its a lot like the Body Lockers scene between Tandy and Todd later.
Yeah I love that scene.
And Carol says its a marriage of convenience, and both of those actors do such a great job.
The chemistry between them is great.
You see Melissa fall in love with Carol right there.
So were always looking for ways to get them checking in with each other.
I guess Will had gotten a taste of regurgitated cheese and he was just chasing that high.
Gas expiringmuch like food expiringis very much my jam here.
I assume this building dread was all part of the plan?
Theyre on the Titanic and refuse to do anything about it.
Broken World is a phrase we end up saying a lot.
and we say, Well, just keep in mind its a broken world.
Nothing works great, nothing looks great, everythings janky, everythings duct-taped.
He reads up on this stuff.
But the gas detail, thats one thing Max pointed out that we thought wed better address.
And it also gave us, like you said, a good start for a story.
Repopulating and building a new society?
We could certainly go there.
I mean thats Carol Pilbasians original plan.
Theyre modern and weak-willed and just stupidly hanging onto the crumbling infrastructure all around them.
So we like that Phil brings it up, since someone would.
But we also really like that everyones response is YOLO.
But they also have a point.
Its a risky trigger to pull.
There must have been a lot of discussion in that area.
It really felt like the elephant in the room to us.
We fancy ourselves a show that will hit people with harsh reality once in a while.
Thats kind of our secret sauce, right in the pilot, when Phil starts to kill himself.
How would it really feel if it were you?
Shouldnt someone at least suggest they live closer to a river?
Would repopulation really make sense to everyone?
So at this point in the series, it was just a critical mass.
Its definitely an interesting topic for these people.
The credit for that idea really belongs to the women on our staff.
Mainly Liz Cackowsky and Emily Spivey were really strong voices in that camp for a long time.
All throughout season one, actually.
The women in the room were like, No fucking way would I have a baby in this world.
Childbirth is scary in a visceral way for the people who actually have to go through it.
Its scary enough in our modern world, so its terrifying in a world without medicine.
Through most of human history, childbirth was life-threatening for the mother.
Im relieved that we didnt drop the ball on getting that point of view into the show.
This seems like a pretty crazy obstacle to give them.
How did you get to this place?
We didnt really have them working together in season one, except kind of on the cow thing.
But we always knew their dynamic would be perfect Mutt and Jeff, Laurel and Hardy stuff.
The wire flapping around will probably strike some people as too much.
I think we did a much better version of their dynamic in the morgue story, so lesson learned.
We see the first real evidence of how messed up Gail is over Gordon.
What was the discussion over her arc for this half of the season?
But when we saw her throw herself at that dummy in 203, it opened up a different door.
She made it feel more like a story than a joke.
I guess thats the price you pay when you have such an intelligent actress doing your jokes.
Mary Steenburgen puts meaning into things that we didnt see meaning in.
Erik Durbin was on set for that scene.
So from then on, it was like an inside joke we would tell in the room.
Like, Well you know Gail is definitely fucking that doll.
And so were in this situation where were going, What is Gail doing in this episode?
Should she be studying medicine?
And that sounds boring as hell.
And then someone jokes, Well, we should just show her going to town on that doll.
And when we followed the emotion behind that joke, it led us to Todd.
Phil really starts to become the antagonist and wet blanket of the season here.
We worried a little that we were pushing Phil 2 into bad guy territory too fast.
And honestly, I think we did push it a little quicker than I would have liked.
So Im relieved you didnt call us on that.
So it was definitely time for the train to get rolling on Bad Phil.
And hopefully, all of his actions are understandable, if not entirely justified.
Our walkthrough onLast Man on Earthssecond season will continue tomorrow.The previous entries can be found here.
