TV REVIEW: 'FUTURAMA'
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In the land of the nerds, the one-eyed mutant is queen. On Thursday, June 24, 2010, Comedy Central brought the cartoon sitcom Futurama back to life from a network (Fox) TV death with the occasional haunts on DVD. Expectations couldn’t have been higher. And to clarify, Futurama ain’t just for the nerds.
Futurama, conceived by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, centers on a lovable oaf named Fry from the year 2000 who, in a pizza delivery accident, wakes up a thousand years later in a tripped-out New New York City, only to befriend the employees of the Planet Express delivery company owned by liver-spotted mad scientist Professor Farnsworth. What’s interesting is that Futurama has stood out in the past, to me mostly anyway, not so much for the uniqueness of its setting or the eccentricities of its characters — which are legs most sitcoms stand on and this one surely could — but on the uniqueness of its comic style. Futurama is typically all at once smart, dumb, paced, playful, and sweet. I’ve watched the whole series top-to-bottom a few times, and some episodes I have to consciously avoid so as not to cry, such as the episode where Fry mourns the loss of his dog a thousand years earlier who stood waiting for him outside his pizza shop for the remainder of his life, and other episodes — well, wait, there’s no episode at all that I try to avoid because it flat out sucks.
Futurama – in its on again, off again network prime from 1999 to 2003 — was always on. The futuristic setting does allow for fantastic scenarios and loopy characters from President Nixon (now president again as a preserved head in a glass jar) to Morbo the news anchor alien who detests humans, to the hypnotoad which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, to one of the main cast, Dr. Zoidberg, a crustacean quack of a clawed doctor. Him, Fry, the one-eyed mutant love of his life, Leela, the robot bastard of a guy Bender, and the rest of the Planet Express crew take off to the corners of the Universe, often encountering sci-fi regulars like time travel, other dimensions, alien invasions, and often the responsibility to save the world. By my estimation, I’m doing a horrible job of trying to explain what Futurama was except to say it’s very much well worth the watching. So I might as well get to why I started this to begin with — what Futurama is.
In 2007, Futurama returned in a set of four direct-to-DVD-and-Blu-ray movies entitled Benders Big Score, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender’s Game, and Into The Wild Green Yonder. These films were constructed to later run on Comedy Central as strewn-together individual episodes which set off their pacing by a mile. Some were okay, like Score; some were amongst the worst things I may have ever seen, like Backs. All were still beautiful to look at, as Futurama still employed its trademark mishmash of hand-drawn and 3D computer animated models of animation.
Anticipation was truly pent up for this week, when Futurama would be formally re-unleashed on the world in its purely episodic form. The films were thought to be a slow rehabilitation from a near-death experience, and with its new fifth season on Comedy Central, Futurama was to be back on its feet…except it wasn’t totally.
The first episode, appropriately but not too wittily titled “Rebirth,” basically served to pick us up where we left off and transition into what’s to come. At the end of “Yonder,” Leela had finally agreed to get her kiss on with Fry and be a couple, as the entirety of the Planet Express crew leaped into a black hole to escape oncoming laser fire — final destination unknown. In “Rebirth,” they crash-land on Earth and are reconstituted using a pool of stem cells. “Aren’t these controversial?” Fry wonders. “In your time, yes,” the Professor says, “In our time, shut up!” Ah, so some of the Futurama comedy stayed alive through the crash. But the episode was still a bit tied down in a “previously on…” tone, and it was evident that the show is going to have some issues with the fact that one of its central tensions, Fry’s undying and not-returned love for Leela, is no longer available. It seems as if the show will play him as a dumb boyfriend, which will work okay but perhaps not as well as dumb want-to-be boyfriend. Basically, by the end of it all, we got a “Woo hoo! We’re back, everyone!” moment and moved onto episode two, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela,” which is where the meat and potatoes should have been served.
I’ll admit, by this point, I was getting sleepy after a long day of doing things like not watching television, but “Gadda” still felt lacking. It had an intelligent, clever Futurama premise contrasting the threat of the end of the world by a censoring V-Chip death star with Leela and brash buffoon Captain Zap Brannigan’s Adam and Eve new beginnings on an Eden planet, but in an episode named after her, Leela didn’t seem all that Leela on Eden. And separating the cast this way was kind of frustrating when, after seven years, you just wanted to see them together. A focus on a side-character like Brannigan isn’t odd or unwelcome usually, but may have been a bit early in the game.
The writers of Futurama know the reasons for their success and what we love as an audience. In some form or another, we got that in these episodes, from Herme’s laid-back Jamaican totalitarianism with his bathroom surveillance tapes, to Zoidberg being the mysterious toilet paper-eating bathroom burglar, to Bender being forced to party all of “Rebirth” because of an energy-producing doomsday device in his belly. But for at least these two episodes, although they were funny to a point, it felt like Futurama and its characters were doing an impression of themselves.
It isn’t totally odd. Think of someone you haven’t seen in seven months, let alone seven years. When you run into them, no matter how close you were or are, things might be stilted at first — you might just be playing up the character qualities you think they remember about you, or vice versa. But if you stay hanging with them for a few days, the old rhythms emerge, the natural chemistry is reproduced — rebirthed, if you will — stem cells or not.
I’m happy to see my old buddy Futurama again. We’ve had so many good times together, I’m gonna give it the benefit of the doubt. In a few more episodes, the exclamation point of “We’re back!” at the end of the first episode should be justified. If not, the writers and animators always have the hypnotoad to dupe us.
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