'Last Man' the story of a beautiful, horrible friendship

Will Forte's "The Last Man on Earth" premiered Sunday night on Fox, with two episodes back-to-back. Now it may be told, without fear of spoilers, that the title is specific only about gender (as far as we can see from here): Kristen Schaal came along in the second half as the world's last woman to change a show about behavior in the absence of society to behavior in a society of two.

Still, as sitcoms go, it is unusually elemental.

Despite taking place five years in the future and sharing the title and more or less the premise of a 1964 Vincent Price movie - post-pandemic post-apocalypse - it is not science-fiction. It's an abstraction, really, a comedy about existential cares and social mores. It asks what you do when it doesn't matter what you do because there's no one else around to care, or to care about. And what you do when, suddenly, there is.

Do you stop at stop signs? Eat with a fork? Not park in a handicapped space? Schaal's Carol, who is ruled by rules, would say yes. To Phil, "the whole freaking world is a parking spot now."

You can go many ways from this premise, philosophically and dramatically. The productive path "Last Man" takes is comedy, some of it broad, some of it smart, some of it low, some of it slapstick, some it disturbing, some of it disgusting - a laugh for every taste. It is dark, but in a strangely sunny way. (That it is set in the bright desert air of Tucson may account in part for that.)

It's not a show you'll want to hold to strict standards of possibility. The unexplained virus that has leveled humanity, present company excepted, has also seemingly carted off the bodies and left the place tidy. The world just seems like a Sunday morning before anyone's gotten up.

Shaggy and bearded like his "SNL" character the Falconer, Forte is also the show's creator. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, of "The Lego Movie," are his fellow executive producers; their names have also been pillaged for Forte's character, Phil Miller.

As the series opens, Phil has returned home from a nationwide search for fellow survivors, having left the painted message "Alive in Tucson" behind him. Carol has followed the signs; Phil, seconds from completing a suicidal car crash, sees her smoke.

A fortyish temp worker before disaster made him the king of all he surveys, Phil has been living off the fat of untended supermarkets, pairing SpaghettiOs with ten-thousand-dollar wine. Hopeful at first, he grows negligent, then despairing. The mansion he has taken as his own fills up with trash, his beard with crumbs. He has turned a swimming pool into a toilet and a wading pool into a giant margarita, in which he lolls and drinks.

"There's really no wrong way to use a margarita pool," he tells Carol on tour of his domestic shambles.

Carol, by contrast, grows tomatoes, is chirpy and talkative, clean and orderly. She sees a divinely arranged procreative purpose in their meeting. She also wants a proposal first.

Forte projects an innate normality that keeps his characters companionable, even at their most astringent or abnormal. Schaal, whom you'll find seemingly wherever good comedy is, has a naturally daffy bearing she infuses here with seriousness and depth.

There were times Sunday night when the series felt on the verge of becoming a tired joke about How Women Are (and How They Want Men to Be), even after the end of the world. But the actors bring it back from that brink. This is just the beginning of a beautiful horrible friendship.