We live in an era of dystopias and post-apocalypses. More than any previous era (barring, perhaps, the 80s), pop culture seems fixated on bleak futures. The Hunger Games series, the Divergent series, Mad Max: Fury Road, Interstellar... The list gets longer every year. In a political landscape that seems unconcerned with future-planning, if current environmental and infrastructure policies are anything to go by, this end-of-society fear/fantasy makes sense. If pop culture reflects society, what do current dark-future stories say about us? On television, three of the biggest post-apocalyptic shows have three very different audiences. On Fox, we have a comedy, The Last Man on Earth, on AMC, the overwhelmingly popular The Walking Dead, and on The CW, The 100, a YA book adaptation in the vein of Hunger Games or Divergent. What do these three shows and their target audiences say about us and how we live now?
The pilot episode of The Last Man on Earth received rave revues and was widely celebrated as a groundbreaking premise for a comedy. Our hero, Phil Miller (series co-creator, Will Forte), is the titular Last Man, the only survivor of a mysterious disease that wiped out the entire human race (and apparently somehow vanished any trace of the bodies?) leaving Phil to his own devices. Without companionship and without social contracts to check his behavior, things get pretty bleak pretty fast. Phil follows the example of Tom Hanks's Castaway and creates a few dozen Wilsons of his own. He spends his days flirting with mannequins, lighting things on fire, drinking, masturbating, and pooping into a pool. It's a lonely, post-apocalyptic frat house, the ultimate bachelor fantasy taken to its inevitable, dark conclusion, which, in Phil's case, is a suicide attempt. But the twist at the end of the first episode is the appearance of a rescuer, another survivor: Carol (Kristen Schaal). Because she's an adult, the two immediately clash (he's a slob! she's a neat-freak! how will they get along??) and the show immediately comes down to earth after its lofty premiere, eventually becoming something that felt like an SNL sketch extended beyond the ability of its premise.
The running joke is basically that Phil is terrible. Over and over again, he tries to lie and manipulate others into giving him what he wants, which is basically just sex with the most attractive woman around. The string of additional characters (another one of the show's gimmicks that quickly got stale) eventually reveals the crux of Phil's terribleness: his masculine insecurity. Phil's fantasy is about as complex as any adolescent boy's: he wants to do what he wants and have everyone love and respect him, regardless of whether or not he cares for them in return. It's in service of this fragile masculinity that Phil tries to destroy the fabric of the society the others are trying to rebuild. He tries to prevent others from finding them, limit resources, even leave his fellow survivor and sexual rival, Todd (Mel Rodriguez) to die in the desert. It's tough to root for this kind of person, but the finale makes Phil the victim and restores our sympathy, somewhat. The most recent arrival, a more attractive, more useful Phil Miller (Boris Kodjoe), exiles Original Phil, inspiring Carol to give him a second chance, especially after Original Phil manages to show her the tiniest bit of affection.
It's kind of a stretch to call this "growth" on Phil's part. The fear that drives him in the first episode is his fear of dying alone, which is the same fear that drives him to marry Carol and, in the end, to show her basic human decency and respect. His obvious anxiety about his inadequacy, particularly when sexual rivals are introduced, all circles back to this same fear. Phil's story is a classic Apatow man-child fable of an adult man who wants to behave like a child until it becomes clear that other adults don't have the patience to entertain his behavior. We've seen this story before, and while it still has its audience among countless frat boy Peter Pans, it's losing its critical appeal. Like the characters on Last Man, we've lost patience for it. It will be interesting to see where the show takes its second season, considering that Phil seems to have come to an understanding with Carol, and, as we learn in the season's final twist, Phil's astronaut brother is still alive on the International Space Station.
The Walking Dead is another form of male fantasy, but one that keeps playing out over the course of multiple seasons, with little time spent dwelling on male anxiety. Our hero in zombie-torn Atlanta is Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a sheriff. It couldn't be much clearer: The Walking Dead is a male fantasy in the same vein as classic Westerns, but inverted. In John Wayne classics, a rugged white man travels West to bring "civilization" to a savage land. Rick Grimes, also a rugged white man, has no interest in civilizations.
In fact, the show's fear is a return to civilized society. Dead's most popular characters, male and female alike, tend to be the loners who have no interest in rebuilding society as it was before. The non-zombie villains are usually preying on those who think establishing pre-outbreak style communities will protect them. When the show's core group encounters others attempting to reboot society, something terrible inevitably happens. The farm of season two is masking a barn full of walkers, another promised haven houses a psychotic dictator under the folksy demeanor of The Governor, and the latest attempt to rebuild, the Alexandria Safe-Zone, is another failure. Alexandria has the same dark personal secrets of our current pre-apocalyptic society, as well as another flaw, in Rick's mind: they're not violent enough to survive the post-zombie world.
The Walking Dead is wildly successful, especially in television's favorite demographic: men aged 18-40. A lot of this success is because, even in the face of logic, the show perpetuates this reverse-Western fantasy of lawless badassery and frontiersmanship. The zombie outbreak as presented in The Walking Dead would simply never happen, especially in the gun-toting Deep South. An enemy so slow and inefficient wouldn't survive a week in open-carry states, let alone months or years. But the faceless inhuman enemy is an uncomplicated reason to call these loner heroes to action. It's ultimately a pretty feeble excuse to indulge in the fantasy of being like Daryl or Michonne or Rick: an adaptive survivalist and an all-around badass. The group's attempt to set up a society of their own in a local prison also ultimately fails just as completely as any of the other communities they encounter, torn apart by threats within and without, because the fantasy presented by the show is not about rebuilding.
The rebuilding fantasy is the lonely territory of The 100. The title of the show refers to the hundred teenage delinquents that are banished to a radiation-ravaged Earth decades after humanity has fled to a space station. Over the course of the first season, the kids on the ground build their own society with their own ideas of justice (with some missteps along the way), and negotiate the the societies that formed on Earth in their absence: the Grounders and the Mountain Men. In season two, the orbiting society that exiled them is forced to join them on the ground, and the two begin to clash.
Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and her mother, Abigail (Paige Turco) find themselves disagreeing with how the new society is to be run. Abigail and her fellow leaders from the orbiting station want to rebuild their space society on Earth, but Clarke and her friends have more experience with the world as it is, and better understanding of their fellow Earth-dwellers. The fantasy of The 100 is the chance for young people to rebuild the society that their parents broke. The teenagers were literally sent to Earth to die by a society that had no resources or leniency for them. Their distrust is reasonable, and resonates with the anger many millennials feel at the generations that destroyed their planet, populated their government with corrupt and inefficient politicians, and left them a crippling national debt.
The fear of The 100's protagonists is a reversion to that previous society, either by losing power to the Mountain Men (a sinister group trapped in a bunker by their vulnerability to radiation, desperate to be free to roam the ground) or by becoming the society that would abandon them the way their parents did. Clarke risks and sacrifices anything to ensure the safety of her friends, to ensure that none of them are abandoned to outside forces. Her determination to protect them makes her do terrible things, things that she struggles to live with.
This is something the three protagonists have in common. Their circumstances and their fears push them to their limits. We see Phil balk at abandoning Todd in the desert. We see Rick struggle with leadership, whether he's struggling to accept control of the group's decisions or to cede power to someone else. We see Clarke so traumatized by the outcomes of the choices she felt she had to make that she finds herself unable to face the people she made them for. As much as post-apocalyptic media is an escapist fantasy for us, it is also a reminder that we don't truly want that for ourselves, that as much as we find ourselves feeling inadequate, unappreciated, or underwhelmed by society as it is, it beats the alternative. But there's also a reason why we no longer seem to have utopian future fantasies, like Star Trek, why even the rebooted version of Trek was gritty and grim: we are not optimistic about our future, fictional or otherwise. Maybe that's why we need the fantasy.
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