"It was a sad thing to get right."
'The Last Man on Earth' aired back from 2015 to 2018, and the number of coincidences it has with what's currently happening in the world is freaky, to say the least.
The show imagines what would happen if a deadly virus swept the globe in the year 2020.
Quarantines, homemade PPE, the wearing of masks in public, and deaths of public figures were referenced throughout the show.
Even weirder, 'Last Man on Earth' portrayed Tom Hanks, who was one of the first celebrities to come forward when diagnosed with COVID-19, as the first to get sick with the show's fictional virus too.
The Observer talked with the show's creator and star Will Forte, about the legacy of the comedy series. Forte said he thought it was "a sad thing to get right" regarding the show's predictions.
Speaking about the writing process of 'Last Man on Earth', he said: "A lot of the time these elements that we came up with we thought were maybe exaggerating what would actually happen, and then it’s been very interesting to watch how everything unfolded for the last year–year-and-a-half, because there were a lot of things we got a lot closer than we would have originally thought...
"Then when we would see these horrifying images in the news last year, when there was a huge shortage of PPE, you’d see nurses basically wearing what we wrote [Kristen Wiig] wearing as a joke. It was a sad thing to get right."
Asked if there was a particular moment in the last year that hit him, Forte answered: "There were a lot of times in the last year that I was reminded by people that I worked with who would say, “Hey, we were not so far off.”
"It started with someone sending me a screengrab of the pilot episode that says the year is 2020, and it’s a year after the virus after the virus hit. Even just seeing that was like that was kind of eerie.
"It was very interesting to be in that headspace for four years and then to have a couple years away from it gave a little bit of perspective. It was a scenario I felt kind of close to.
"Obviously in our show we took it to a crazy extreme where most of the people on earth died. Thank God, it’s looking like the world is not going to suffer that. This massive amount of casualty is so heartbreaking.
"There is a little bit of guilt that I feel for having fun with it. We just thought this is a situation that would never happen with the scientific advancements that we have today.
"I look back now and certainly we took it to an exaggerated point. It’s never going to be a situation where seven people live and everyone on earth dies, but still you feel guilty. My heart goes out to everyone who lost people. Sorry that we used this premise for four years of making these jokes."