http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-last-man-on-earth/253412/last-man-on-earth-writers-room-walkthrough-part-3

Was it always this bacon incident to bring Tandy and Todd back together? Did you guys weigh other options, or did it all come down to food in the end? We had been talking about frozen food since last year. I kept pitching it as a quest – like they see a photo in a magazine article about some government bunker, like a missile silo, and the only photo that the magazine was allowed to publish was a pic of the kitchen. And Tandy’s looking at this old magazine and he sees a frozen pizza in the photo. And he reasons that the freezer is probably still working, so he leads everyone on a Goonies-style quest to find that frozen pizza. And that, I’m afraid, is the Community experience coming out of me. That’s a pretty typical start for a Community story, but not Last Man. I must have pitched that 25 times and it never got any traction. But the idea of a working freezer had some staying power, so it morphed into this bacon idea. As I remember, it took some fiddling to try to get the idea of a bacon freezer to be the thing which bonds Tandy and Todd. It could have gone any number of ways. But a shared secret seemed to win the day. A shared secret is a pretty great way to repair a relationship. I’m filing that away for future me when I’m stuck on a story.

As nice as it is to have these cows be a part of the show, are they just the absolute worst to film with?
No no, absolutely not. They come with this guy named Scott, a total cowboy who wears a hat and everything. We’re like, “Hey, Scott, can Will slap her on the butt? Will she freak out?” And Scott will be like, super quiet, man of very few words. He’ll just look at us and say with an assured understated drawl, “She’ll be alright.” And a sense of cowboy calm comes over all of us, and the world gets simple, and everything that’s hard in this crazy concrete jungle just melts into a single sweet soulful harmonica note ringing out across the endless starlit prairie.
Incidentally, our cow is named Cat, and she is the most beautiful magnificent cow you’ve ever seen and she is in the Chick-Fil-A commercials.

Along the same lines, this episode spends a lot of time on Tandy and Phil repairing their volatile relationship. Why was that particularly important to you guys?
It was important to Will, which made it important to us. Will likes to explore male relationships – the way men size each other up and compete, and the way they can barely express feelings to each other. And I’m sure a squadron of therapists could explain why he likes that theme, but the short answer, in my opinion, is that it’s really funny when Tandy is losing a dick-measuring contest. And what we get out of all this Tandy/Phil stuff is a set-up for a tearjerker. In some ways, Phil was to Tandy this year as Melissa was to him in the early part of last year. They’re both mountains for Tandy to climb. So we wanted Tandy to get up to the top of that mountain before losing it.

She’s just not dishing in the way that Todd is. She’s also harder to read by design. I mean, the flipside is that January plays her very subtly and we do like that. It feels right that Melissa is somewhat of a mystery. In this episode, what we intended was basically that Melissa wants what she wants and doesn’t want to pay much of a price for it. She likes Todd but she doesn’t like opening up to people, and she’s really turned off by neediness. She likes Todd when he’s fun and she’s turned off when he wants something deeper. It’s a bit of a role reversal here. Todd is the needy chick and Melissa’s the dude who doesn’t want drama. I think we could have made that clearer with one additional scene of them alone together. But that’s hindsight. And we’re all really proud of some Melissa stuff coming up. Stay tuned. Melissa’s head will be opened.

http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-last-man-on-earth/253426/last-man-on-earth-writers-room-walkthrough-part-4 http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-last-man-on-earth/253431/last-man-on-earth-writers-room-walkthrough-part-5