The Last Ship and Television’s Post-Apocalyptic Era

The Last Ship, a post-apocalyptic action
thriller set on a navy warship after a virus wipes out much of
civilization, isn’t a great show. It’s not even a very good show.
But it’s enjoyably hokey and generally competent, the kind of
straight-shooting genre TV series that, a decade or so ago, I would
have really enjoyed and probably would have found a lot of
fans.

The Last Ship airs on TNT on Sunday nights, and, like
so many series on ad-supported cable these days, it’s serialized,
with an overarching plot that revolves around efforts to find a
cure to the virus. But for a serialized show, it’s also rather
episodic, with most episodes starting and completing a single
adventure story.

In some ways it reminds me of old episodes of the original
Star Trek: There’s a new location most every week, a tough
guy commander who always insists on leaving the ship for missions,
and a consistent four-part structure that tidies up most of the
plot threads every hour, usually with some sort of action climax.
But you can also see elements of Battlestar Galactica (a
close-knit team of militarized survivors dealing with life after an
apocalyptic event) and The Walking Dead (another series
about a living in a world where civilization has collapsed).

Like those shows, as well as HBO’s more ambitious series The
Leftovers, and to a lesser extent FX’s The Strain,
The Last Ship projects a kind of muddled but deep-seated
anxiety about the state of the world, and an obsession with
post-apocalyptic scenarios. Perhaps it’s something to do with the
lingering trauma of 9/11, or maybe it’s the cultural aftershock of
the recent recession, but either way, the show takes as a given a
generalized sense of instability and anxiety—a fear that anything
and perhaps even everything could collapse at any time, without any
warning or explanation.

These are shows about what happens when life as we know it now
ends forever, and they reflect an ascendant strain of contemporary
worries that our current way of living could end, completely, at
any time. In some ways they remind me of the spate of movies in the
70s and early 80s—Death Wish, Escape From New York,
The Road Warrior, The Warriors—that also
reflected a kind of terror that everything could come crashing
down. The difference is that where those movies were typically
about specific contemporary political fears—urban crime, gangs,
political corruption, the oil crisis—the new post-apocalyptic
sensibility tends to reflect something a bit more nebulous. It’s a
particularly modern fear of complexity and fragmentation and
massive systemic breakdown. They’re not just worried about the end
of everything. They’re worried about the possibility that
everything might end and we won’t even know why.

The Last Ship is, by far, the lightest and least gloomy
of these series, concerned more with hitting its episodic
action-adventure beats than with exploring darkness and loss. And
in that sense, it also reminds me of the sort of no-frills
thrillers and action movies that Hollywood used to make far more
often. In particular, it recalls some of the
mid-to-late 80s heroic action movies, the ones starring tough guys
like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone, many of which had a soft
conservative bias that you also see in The Last Ship. It’s
a show in which Middle Eastern terrorists are unambiguous bad guys,
private security contractors are good guys, religious belief is
normal and accepted, and the heroes—acting on their own but in the
uniforms of the U.S. military—decide in one episode to take out the
equivalent of a small, third-world dictator, even after a lecture
on the perils of interventionism. There’s even a regular role for
outspoken conservative actor Adam Baldwin. It’s a post-apocalyptic
action series as if crafted by the Bush administration.

Like I said, it’s not great, but it is surprisingly competent,
with crisp action, clear plotting, an intriguing overall mystery,
and strong production values. Which is why it’s also suggestive of
the ways that both television and movies have changed over the last
few years. In the 1980s or 90s, a show like this, with high
production values, solid execution, and a strong concept, might
have been one of the better shows on television, or at least one of
the best genre shows on in any given year. Now it’s merely average,
relatively to what else is available.

At the same time, shows like this (and TNT’s Legends)
are filling the niche left by Hollywood, which has gravitated
toward a system that focuses almost exclusively on a few
giant-sized tentpole releases each year. The Last Ship is
the TV equivalent of the competent, not-too-ambitious,
low-to-mid-budget movie that’s rarely made anymore. And it’s made
possible by the rapidly growing market for original scripted
programming on cable, and the decline of the broadcast network
model that ruled for so many decades.

In that sense, the show is actually the result of the kind of
complexity that it and other current post-apocalyptic shows seem to
fear—the product of a media ecosystem that is increasingly
fragmented and niche-driven, one that produces far more original
series, often at far higher quality, than it did just a decade or
two ago, even as the old network-driven system collapses, and
Hollywood becomes driven by an ever-smaller number of mass-appeal
megahits.

In a way, then, the evolving media marketplace that gave us
The Last Ship and its fellow apocalyptic dramas provides a
response to the fears of systemic breakdown that they reflect: Yes,
the old ways and old standards might end, but something more
interesting and more complex will arise in its place. This is
television in the post-apocalyptic era, and it’s sprawling,
interesting, and surprisingly great.