Futurama review: Hulu's new series is fun, but that's about it (it's okay)

Futurama Provided by Hulu

The world of touring music offers a balance between artists promoting new material and traditional artists who still fill venues by playing from the much-loved catalogue. I doubt any entertainer aspires to the “traditional artist” label, but that doesn’t mean traditional artists don’t make good music. They just know what the fans want and deliver it.

The first six episodes of the new Futurama season finds the beloved animated comedy in the form of “traditional artists.” Who can blame it for this? If ever there was one show that needed to provide a level of fan service to its core audience, it was a show that was canceled by Fox in , then revived first as a series of long-running episodes, and then regularly aired on Comedy Central where ended.

Futurama

Bottom line An acceptable and interesting comeback.

Airdate: Monday, July (Hulu)
Cast: Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Phil LaMarr, Lauren TomDeveloped by: Matt Groening and David X. Cohen

But even then, dead didn’t actually mean “dead” and clamoring from devotees led to Hulu reviving the series once again. Would Hulu actually make new series without a full roster of vocal talent? Maybe not, but the deafening online outrage over stalled contract negotiations likely played at least a small role in ensuring that all the stars were back in the latest revival.

因此，如果有一句“我们是来玩热门歌曲的！” 感觉这个 飞出个未来 季开始时，这并不会让剧集变得糟糕，也不意味着后面的剧集——Hulu 到目前为止已经订购了 – 最终不会开拓出新的领域。 It just shows a sense of respect, and without the fans, the series would have been mothballed for years. If the reward for this enthusiasm is a healthy pandering, then what’s the harm?

This is a small obstacle to the return of Futurama , whether intentional or not, the Comedy Central airing has a very strong plot wrapped around it. Frye (Billy West) and Lila (Katie Sagal) experience a lifetime of lonely married bliss because of a defective time-changing button, and then, when the Professor (again, West) fixes the button, they’re able to go back and live their lives again, surrounded by the people they love. It’s not the funniest Futurama episode – although the time loop changes that cause Fry to be repeatedly squashed into goo is pretty good – but it’s very sweet and romantic, and it underscores many of the points the show makes repeatedly about the possibilities and limitations of time travel. Emotionally, this is the right place to leave Futurama … but it has to be undone now.

The new season — which I absolutely refuse to try to count what this is, as various truncated seasons and movies have rendered traditional counting meaningless — returns in the now-industry-standard format. Written by show veteran Patric M. Verrone, “The Impossible Stream” is a “We got canceled and now we’re rebooting, so we’re going to make fun of it!” episode. Will and Grace made one. Xiaozi made one. party down made one. The winks and nudges are cute, but it’s hard to remember the last time one of these episodes really felt fresh. I might need to go all the way back to the Family Guy joke that after the show returned for its first episode, Peter Griffin listed every other show that Fox failed between cancellation and resurrection. This is the last time I’ll say anything nice about Family Guy

The premiere shifted from reboot commentary to commentary on the streaming world, with Fry announcing his decision to give himself a purpose in life, and to everyone’s horror, that purpose was to watch every episode of TV ever made, starting with a subscription to Fulu, the “world’s fourth most popular streaming service.” See what they did there? The resulting episodes are full of hilarious and not-so-funny puns and references, TV critics are the target audience, but the resulting comedy is genial and subdued. I think it’s better suited as an unintentional critique of the current two labor strikes — one of Fry’s last successful shows was a sitcom starring easily replaceable robots — than anything related to the streaming universe.

Subsequent episodes that retrace the Fry/Leila run so that they can live together for the first time and experience other romantic growing pains that the early finale goes well beyond, give a sense of being outlined in terms of what fans are dying to see. This is in stark contrast to building episodes around forward-thinking conceptualizations of psychedelic and wacky episodes.

Instead, it’s more like: Do you think Nibbler is cute? It’s an episode of Nibbler! Do you remember Robot Santa? It’s an episode of Robot Santa!

The amount of callbacks and repeating characters is a great way to keep the audience re-engaged, and it’s not necessarily a sign of creative laziness. The second part of the season—”Remember Keef? Here’s an episode of Kif!”—directly flashes back to “Kif Kif Knocked Up a Notch,” which ends with Keef telling Amy (Lauren Tom) that their weird baby tadpole won’t survive out of water for I can only imagine the excitement when the writers realized they could actually follow up on that punch line years later That clarity and contagious joy pervades what is probably my favorite of the first installments.

It’s not that the show has run out of things the writers wanted to say, either. They don’t seem to have much to say about these things. There’s a plot parodying Bitcoin, envisioning a cryptocurrency run as an extension of the Everything here is its own. Then there’s an episode about moms — “Remember Mom? It’s an episode of moms!” — and a thriving online business. The company is called Momazon, and their warehouses use robotic workers. That’s all there is to it.

There wasn’t a single overtly useless episode in this series, every episode made me smile. Meanwhile, there isn’t a single memorable new character, inspired plot structure, or puzzling futuristic whimsy in this batch of six episodes. You can tell me these are episodes from the original series and I won’t be surprised. This is perfectly acceptable, but a bit disappointing.

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