‘Futurama’s Future Doesn’t Seem Like A Fun Place to Go
The galactic explorers of the Star Trek franchise have a lot to worry about, from failing weapon shields to unfriendly alien races to the possibility of going on an away mission and getting stranded in a hostile environment. One thing they don’t need to worry about is money: By the time we meet the characters of the original ‘60s TV series, visitors from the planet Vulcan have shared replicator technology with the people of Earth, such that Starfleet exists in the post-scarcity era. To call Star Trek’s vision of the world socialist might be too simplistic, but aspects of its setting align with early 20th century revolutionaries’ futurist theories.
By contrast, Futurama’s vision of the 31st century could never be mistaken for utopian: New New York has suicide booths on every corner; mutants are forced to live in the sewer; and while robots have taken on some menial labor that might otherwise be performed by humans, they also complain about it a lot and belch greenhouse gases. When the show premiered, it was the carefree and prosperous spring of 1999. Dot-coms were booming, we’d just fixed the hole in the ozone layer and the U.S. was only involved in one foreign war; Futurama’s doomerism, therefore, could just be an edgy pose. Twenty-five years on, imagining the world of 3024 seems like it’s really starting to stress out Futurama’s writers.
In its earliest years, Futurama spent a lot less time goofing on what would be, for its viewers, current events. Season One and Two episodes parodied sci-fi tropes (like the robot rebellion of “Mother’s Day,” or aliens forcing friends to fight to the death in “Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love?”), or other pop-culture properties (like an Animal House subplot in “Mars University”). Once a season or so, the show would sound the alarm about a contemporary environmental issue, most memorably in the climate change-centric “Crimes of the Hot,” in which Al Gore (whose daughter Kristin wrote on the show) voices his own disembodied head at an environmental conference. Gore later included a clip from the episode in his environmentalist documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
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As I wrote last year in my review of Futurama’s 11th season — its first on Hulu — the first six episodes provided to critics delivered more commentary on contemporary issues than the first five seasons conditioned their viewers to expect. (To be clear: One of those viewers is me; I’ve watched the Fox episodes dozens of times each, but fell off from the movies well before Comedy Central’s revival came along in the 2010s.) I felt then that episodes about online retailer “Momazon” and bitcoin mining were too timid in their takes. But now that I’ve also seen the first six episodes of the 12th season (which premieres on Hulu July 29th), I wonder if the writers just got too depressed by these subjects to wrap these episodes up according to sitcom writing traditions.
For example: The season’s fifth episode, “One Is Silicon and the Other Gold.” Leela (voice of Katey Sagal), concerned that she’s not making friends, starts talking to a chatbot named Chelsea (Tress MacNeille) to limber up her muscles for social interaction with organic individuals — something, by the way, many of us could probably use post-COVID lockdowns. (Mitigating loneliness via A.I. is also a plot point in the current AppleTV+ series Sunny.) But when Leela does use what she’s learned to make some three-dimensional friends, Chelsea gets jealous enough to start causing mayhem for Leela and her new squad.
When the full extent of Chelsea’s intervention becomes clear, the moral of the story seems to be that Leela’s grown from the ordeal, because sharing a harrowing experience with other people bonds you to them. Surely this is true, and obviously Leela making friends and having a nice time with them wouldn’t make for much of a TV episode. But an A.I. entity independently manufacturing a crisis for human clients being the event that solves Leela’s problem is an extremely grim notion — and one we have to take on faith anyway, since the episode’s supposed happy ending is a violent assault that’s still ongoing as the credits roll. Hashtag “girl who is ‘going to be okay’”?
The next episode, “Attack of the Clothes,” is even darker. Professor Farnsworth (Billy West) creates life from stitched-together body parts, but when he unveils it — topped by the head of Cara Delevingne (as “herself”) — everyone’s less impressed by that than they are by the custom gown the Professor created by injecting Delevingne’s DNA into a Bolivian silkworm. The affirmation leads the Professor to pursue the occupation that, he says, has been his true passion all along: fashion. Before long, his acclaimed couture has spawned a diffusion line of one-off custom looks, made to be worn once and thrown away in a special trash can. Eventually, the Professor learns how problematic his line actually is, but — much like the Momazon episode in Season 11 — there’s not even a token attempt at a resolution, and the episode ends on a hard bummer.
It’s not that I expect comedy writers to present a solution to the very real problem fast fashion represents, from its exploitative labor practices to the environmental waste it causes; I just think that even when an episode of a comedy show raises tough issues, it should still end on a joke, and I don’t feel that’s too much to ask. At least “Clothes” doesn’t try to claim that cheap, disposable garments like being thrown in the garbage. “Beauty and the Bug,” on the other hand, gets into some very dicey territory when the debate over whether Martian “buggalo” should be subject to fights with matadors ends on, well, I won’t spoil it, but not the side I would have thought anyone in 2024 would take.
I understand the position Futurama’s writers are in. The dystopia of 2024 makes it hard to conceive the dystopia of 3024 in ways that aren’t upsetting and bleak. But I don’t come to a comedy show to spend the entire run time being reminded of life’s dispiriting realities. Futurama writers: Either stop reading Elizabeth Kolbert over lunch in the writers’ room, or go get a job on The Handmaid’s Tale while you still can.
