That certainly sounds true, as far as manifestos that can be condensed down to five words and a number go. The evidence is certainly abundant in tragedies, election updates, a peppering of celebrity divorces and deaths. In our disturbingly polarized culture, all parties seem to share a general sense of impending doom.

Even America’s go-to dealer of sugar-coated escapism, the network television comedy, has been infected by our nation’s deepest existential fears. This past Sunday, Fox’s The Last Man on Earth premiered in its third season, and for the third time, the show featured a death and a funeral. What else would you expect from a series about the few survivors of a virus that annihilated the rest of human life?

The Last Man on Earth is the high watermark of gallows humor, a release valve for our end-times anxieties: “Things are bad now, sure, but they could be worse.” Everyone we’ve ever loved could be dead, and we could fear, as the show’s stars do, that the mere act of repopulating the Earth could lead to death from infection.

That certainly sounds true, as far as manifestos that can be condensed down to five words and a number go. The evidence is certainly abundant in tragedies, election updates, a peppering of celebrity divorces and deaths. In our disturbingly polarized culture, all parties seem to share a general sense of impending doom.

Even America’s go-to dealer of sugar-coated escapism, the network television comedy, has been infected by our nation’s deepest existential fears. This past Sunday, Fox’s The Last Man on Earth premiered in its third season, and for the third time, the show featured a death and a funeral. What else would you expect from a series about the few survivors of a virus that annihilated the rest of human life?

The Last Man on Earth is the high watermark of gallows humor, a release valve for our end-times anxieties: “Things are bad now, sure, but they could be worse.” Everyone we’ve ever loved could be dead, and we could fear, as the show’s stars do, that the mere act of repopulating the Earth could lead to death from infection.

That certainly sounds true, as far as manifestos that can be condensed down to five words and a number go. The evidence is certainly abundant in tragedies, election updates, a peppering of celebrity divorces and deaths. In our disturbingly polarized culture, all parties seem to share a general sense of impending doom.

Even America’s go-to dealer of sugar-coated escapism, the network television comedy, has been infected by our nation’s deepest existential fears. This past Sunday, Fox’s The Last Man on Earth premiered in its third season, and for the third time, the show featured a death and a funeral. What else would you expect from a series about the few survivors of a virus that annihilated the rest of human life?

The Last Man on Earth is the high watermark of gallows humor, a release valve for our end-times anxieties: “Things are bad now, sure, but they could be worse.” Everyone we’ve ever loved could be dead, and we could fear, as the show’s stars do, that the mere act of repopulating the Earth could lead to death from infection.