The Premise
Adapted from Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's DC/Vertigo comic, this 2021 FX on Hulu drama opens with a cataclysm that kills every mammal with a Y chromosome, except one twentysomething escape artist named Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzer) and his pet monkey. The survivors left running the ruined world include his mother, a congresswoman turned reluctant president (Diane Lane), his emergency-room-doctor sister Hero (Olivia Thirlby), and a shadowy government operative called Agent 355 (Ashley Romans). The first episodes are pure setup: the event, the collapse of infrastructure, the political vacuum, and the slow assembly of the road-trip pairing the comic is built around. Eliza Clark ran the show. Every episode of the season was directed by a woman.
The Case For
Ashley Romans is the reason to press play. She reads 355 as coiled, tired, and specific in a way the writing sometimes isn't, and she'd have been a genuine star had this thing lasted. Diane Lane brings actual weight to a role that on paper is a walking exposition dump about continuity of government. The production design is good — deserted highways, gridlocked bridges, the quiet horror of infrastructure without maintenance. And Clark's take is smarter than the "guy and his monkey" logline suggests. She's interested in who was already holding the world up before the collapse, which is a real idea.
The Case Against
It's slow. Not deliberate-slow, indecisive-slow. The pilot takes forever to get to the event, then the show splinters into four or five storylines that each move at a crawl, and by episode six you can feel the writers stalling because they've budgeted the road trip across multiple seasons that will never exist. Schnetzer's Yorick is written as an annoying man-child on purpose, but "on purpose" doesn't make him fun to spend an hour with. Some of the political-thriller B-plots feel like an entirely different, duller show grafted onto the good one.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you liked Station Eleven's mournful pace, The Leftovers' willingness to sit in grief, or the early seasons of The Walking Dead when the mood was still doing the heavy lifting, you'll find things here. If you came for the pulpy comic — the swordfights, the astronauts, the ninjas, the actual plot engine of the source material — you'll be checking the runtime by episode three. Anyone who watches a show to finish a show should not begin this one.
The Ruling
SLOP isn't about quality. It's about whether starting is worth it, and this one got euthanized before its finale even aired. FX pulled the plug in October 2021 with the season still on the schedule, and no other platform picked it up. So what you're being sold is ten hours of table-setting for a meal nobody's serving. The craft problem underneath the cancellation is real too: the show paces itself like it has five seasons of runway when it barely has ten hours, and it never picks between political thriller, character study, and adventure story. Ambitious, watchable, unfinished. Don't start what can't finish.