After last month’s Pixar month, I have decided to start this month by reviewing a speculative fiction TV show. The reason why I chose Futurama is because my wife has informed me that I watch it all the time on Netflix.

It is good that Netflix has all 10 seasons of this show, and I think I know why I watch it all the time. Heck, it is a cartoon, and I’ve loved cartoons since I was young. I once heard Futurama described as “a darker Jetsons“, and I suppose that could be a good description of it.

The story is similar to the film Idiocracy, a film that I have reviewed before. The film uses the “frozen man” premise, in which the main character from 1999 wakes up in the year 2999. Phillip J. Fry enters a world of the future that is filled with robots, aliens, spaceships, and other science fiction machinery.

Fry, who was once a pizza delivery boy, becomes a delivery boy in the future for Planet Express, a futuristic shipping company that delivers throughout the universe. With him is Leela, a one-eyed starship captain who is as feisty as she is caring. Another main character is Bender, a robot made for bending and runs on alcohol. Bender is like the Spock of this show, the character who seems to symbolize what the series is all about.

I have to say that these main three characters work very well together, but some of the main side characters feel weak. This is odd considering that Matt Groening helped create this series, and his famous The Simpsons has iconic side characters. The Simpsons has Moe, Apu, and Principal Skinner, but Futurama has Professor Farnsworth, Amy Wong, Hermes Conrad, and Dr. Zoidberg. Professor Farnsworth is the father figure of show as owner of Planet Express, and he is as brilliant as he is stupid. Amy is an eye-candy grad student who helps them out, and she is as stupid as she is brilliant. Hermes is a Jamaican bureaucrat, and the bureaucracy in the future is pretty humorously established as a business. Then there’s Dr. Zoidberg, who is sort of the Kramer of this show, and I cannot help but love him. I never really appreciated any episodes devoted to these side characters, but I really appreciate the recurring side characters of incompetent Captain Zapp Brannigan and his alien assistant Kif.

This show has a weird history. It was on Fox for about five seasons, and I guess it wasn’t popular enough to keep it going, so they pulled the plug on it. The Cartoon Network ran reruns of it, and I wonder if this enabled the show to stay alive. A few years after the show’s cancellation, four direct-to-DVD movies came out. These films just were not good and got progressively worse, but Comedy Central picked up Futurama for another few seasons. These seasons were also not as good as the first few years, which invariably led to its second cancellation.

What I really think makes this show work is Fry, as it really is his story. On the terrific pilot episode, he wakes up to see the future and realize that his family and friends are dead. At first he is excited about his new life, but it is soon discovered on later episodes how much Frye misses his old life. In addition to the Pilot, I highly recommend episodes like “Jurassic Bark”, “The Why of Fry”, “Luck of the Fryrish”, and “Game of Tones”. All these episodes have very bittersweet endings that one wouldn’t expect to see in an animated comedy like this, and I wish the entire show was as emotionally invested as those episodes.

The rest of Futurama is what you would expect, a satire of our society by showing how ridiculous the future will be. Some of the episodes are good, and others just seem like zany comedy that deliberately goes nowhere. It is worth checking out, if only to see how the world of the 31st century might be.