“The best science fiction story in America,” said the St. Louis Dispatch, “cannot be found in the cinema or on television and not even in the bookstore.

It's in the comic series 'Y: The Last Man'. ”Stephen King said this was the best comic he'd ever read.

Now this classic comic book has been filmed as a television series, and the story that Brian K. Vaughan and the illustrator Pia Guerra came up with nearly twenty years ago is astonishingly contemporary: it imagines an enigmatic plague that all male mammals bear one Y chromosome - drained away on the planet, including embryos and sperm. So, as Vaughan wrote in his comic, 48 percent of the world's population, 459 of the Fortune 500 managers and 99 percent of landowners worldwide are gone. In addition, 95 percent of commercial pilots, truck drivers and ship captains in America were suddenly missing, 99 percent of all mechanics, electricians and construction workers, 85 percent of all government officials and one hundred percent of all Catholic priests, Muslim imams and Orthodox rabbis.

Women rule the world

The statistics may have changed, but not fundamentally, as chief producer Eliza Clark noted in the industry journal Variety: "The overwhelming majority of the people in most of our industries are cis-men," she said.

“Only five percent of truck drivers in the USA are women.” And so the world promptly slips into chaos in your series - planes fall out of the sky, power plants are disconnected, the supply networks are paralyzed when all the men are exhausted.

All but one: the young escape artist Yorick (Ben Schnetzer), who, apart from badly paid appearances, gets by by scrounging money from his sister Hero (Olivia Thirlby), a paramedic. Yorick's companion, a male rhesus monkey named Ampersand, also survived.

In addition to this antihero after the men's apocalypse, there are a lot of fascinating women: the insignificant Congressman Jennifer Brown (Diane Lane), for example, who is now president because the power hierarchy above her was occupied by men; Agent 355 (Ashley Romans) who is supposed to protect the last man in the world; Dr. Allison Mann (Diana Bang), a geneticist who might find out why Yorick survived to prevent the impending extinction of mankind. For Yorick, however, it is important to keep a low profile. Because in addition to those who are allowed to pay high sums for the last man, there are militant groups who perceive the events as "purification" and want to complete them.

There are also characters that were invented for the series: the daughter of the previous president, Kimberly (Amber Tamblyn, who studied to portray Ivanka Trump), the former press secretary of the president, Nora Brady (Marin Ireland), who lost their privileges overnight loses, and hero's friend Sam (Elliot Fletcher), a transgender man who is facing new hostility in a world now ruled by women.

Since the comic was made fifteen years before MeToo and the parlor ability of wacky conspiracy theories, the creators of the adaptation felt compelled to make a few updates.

This apparently led to discrepancies.

A theatrical version of the story had already failed in 2013.

In 2015, FX announced a TV version, but producers split up in 2019 due to creative differences.

The series can now be seen on FX's streaming service at Hulu, and in Germany it is shown on Disney.

Opinions are also divided on the adaptation that is now available.

Many complain that it lacks the playful lightness of the original, and that the start of the series is nothing but gloomy.

It is not the umpteenth infusion of a post-apocalyptic thriller.

The characters are interesting and precisely drawn, they are also played excellently, and the story is captivating.

The new president Jennifer Brown has to discover, among other things, that there is still another contender for the post.

Meanwhile, a handful of Israeli women soldiers are working to ensure that the last “sperm factory” in the world does not fall into the hands of the Arabs.

And then there is a Russian agent who wants to rescue a cosmonaut from the ISS.

The fact that the series addresses the political upheavals of recent years makes it relevant.

The start is promising.

Y: The Last Man

launches today on Disney +.