| USA, 1999-2013 | Comedy/Sci-Fi/Mindfuck | Mainstream | Trailer |
Normally, when people remember witnessing something when they were young, it usually becomes magnified in their minds. Thus, other people that didn’t effectively “grow” with that element in their lifes are usually indifferent towards it. Perhaps it’s my case too, but I think this show deserves a post because I believe it has certain objective qualities that make it a modern classic (and so I will try to make it unbiased).
Futurama, as it happens with its older sister work The Simpsons and other similar animated sitcoms from the late 20th century, is conceived as a satire of the society of the moment and its quirks. The main difference with other contemporary works is that the satire isn’t achieved by exaggerating and farcing real life, but it literally imagines its own universe (how would the world be in the year 3000?), separated from what we know, and introduces elements of the late 1990s-early 2000s USA in it.
This detail may be subtle, but it indeed offers a much wider array of possibilities rather than a simple farce of reality. It not only achieves satire and parody by constantly introducing assets in its universe that resemble well-known things of our everydays, but it also allows the chance of a magnificent worldbuilding where the imagination of its creative team is the only limit. The elements of satire and fantasy are perfectly intertwined in the conception of this fine work, and complement each other so well that you can’t help to wonder in which direction every episode is going to take you, and how deep it’s going to get. The concept deepest lore is wonderfully descriptive for Futurama.
This show is, therefore, indeed presenting its audience a ficticious future Earth, based heavily on all things 20th century, and it manages to bring at the same time well-known concepts and overly (and pleasantly) surprising fantastic elements. In order to transmit the feeling of being in the middle of both poles, the known and the unknown, the show offers us a main character that is in our same situation. Philip J. Fry is an average Joe that during New Year’s Eve of the year 2000 gets cryogenised, just to “wake up” 1000 years later, without any chance of returning. Thus, Futurama shows us the year 3000s New New York from his eyes, so we can experience it as newcomers like Fry, instead of being thrown in the middle of the fantasy assuming we can be knowledgeable on it without any previous context.
The phenomenal writing allows us to experience the shown world gently, and it slowly assumes we are adapting ourselves to it, as much as Fry does. The more the show continues, the more it is assumed that we already know about the shown world, so the focus shifts. We are already familiar with things there, and Futurama slowly starts to open its other greater goodness. Suddenly, the main characters and side characters get more depth, we explore their lives, witness their changes and how everything moves. It’s life what we are seeing there. We accompany the main crew in their futuristic and interstellar adventures and see how they behave in their private and resting moments, we see relationships tighten, we witness how life treats them and how the excellent net of characters and relations starts to be built, changes, and recovers. We rejoice ourselves when things go well to them, we get sad and emotional with their tragedies and sucker punches, we feel like they are part of our family. We end getting new views on things we thought we already knew and we end wondering if this show may affect how we perceive life, too.
Because that’s, in the end, what classical science fiction does. It is more than just a fantasy. It speculates about our condition and how things may develop. It plays with possibilities, it expands the universe in our minds, it parallelises thinking processes and sharpens our perceptions. It makes us reflect on what life is. Futurama does not only indebt to classical science fiction its looks and props (I dare you to recongnise all aesthetic and conceptual references and details that are featured in it) and its parody and critique on actually existing things of the past and the present, but also its reflective nature.
In the end, I should say that this show is a sitcom too, and Futurama is well aware of it. The Aristotelic definition of comedy states that a comedy is a story that features elements of the everyday life, the plot gets twisted and forced, but it always needs to end happily. There is this lapidary sentence that Fry states in one episode: “The secret to the success of a sitcom is that it always should end the same way it begins”. The show respects this statement to the last consequences, and beyond. We can cry, we can get sad and emotional, but I can assure you that Futurama always, always, manages to make us smile in the end.
Thanks for these wonderful 15 years.