‘Futurama’ Fans Say The Show Had The Rare 11/10 Pilot Episode
No TV series has ever started off quite as hot as Futurama — just ask I.C. Wiener.
On March 28, 1999, Fox premiered the pilot episode of a series that they would kick around for a few seasons before dumping from the network, forcing the show to go on a quarter-century, multi-platform search for a permanent home that seems to have finally ended at Hulu. In “Space Pilot 3000,” Simpsons creator Matt Groening debuted an even more outlandish satirical universe than Springfield as Futurama perfectly introduced its inaugural fans to the world of the 31st century and the colorful cast of characters who called it home. When pizza delivery boy and chair-leaner Philip J. Fry fell (or was pushed) into a cryogenic freezing chamber set to preserve him for a thousand years, he took the audience with him into one of the most fantastical and fully realized worlds ever unveiled in a show’s first episode.
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Earlier this week, one Twitter user challenged TV-watchers everywhere to name a show that had “an 11/10 pilot episode,” and Futurama fans knew there was only one correct answer:
Groening wrote “Space Pilot 3000” with Futurama co-creator and co-developer David X. Cohen, and the pair worried that the episode would end up far too expository to ever be a hit, considering the sheer amount of setup required to start a fish-out-of-water story set a full thousand years in the future. According to the Futurama Season One DVD commentary, Groening and Cohen also worried about living up to the pitch they gave Fox for the world of the show, wanting the Futurama universe to be neither “dark and drippy” in the style of the film Blade Runner, nor “bland and boring” like the previous most popular animated comedy set in the future, The Jetsons.
On top of that, Futurama’s mission statement was to both parody and pastiche all the sci-fi media that came before it, so Groening and Cohen had to fill nearly every frame of “Space Pilot 3000” with references to Star Trek, Star Wars, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and various other foundational pieces of fiction in the sci-fi canon. And, of course, as so many Futurama fans pointed out on Twitter, Groening and Cohen also needed to plant the seeds of multiple plot threads throughout the pilot that wouldn't emerge into the foreground for many seasons.
With so many unique challenges facing Groening and Cohen and only 23 minutes to tackle them, it’s a near-miracle that the world of Futurama and its characters, relationships and sense of humor came out fully formed in “Space Pilot 3000.” As such, 11/10 might honestly be too low of a rating for such an incredible piece of TV history. In fact, the numerical rating should probably match the number of years Fry spent frozen — let’s give it 1,000,000/10.
