I remember watching episodes of Futurama on Adult Swim. I enjoyed them, and finally rewatching them now as a grown-up, I enjoy them even more, and that is because Futurama is funny. Even when I don’t laugh out loud, I still smile at many of the less successful jokes; the series is so charming that it is difficult to resent it when a joke outright flops (which certainly happens now and then, like when Zapp Brannigan sexually harassed Leela in ‘Love’s Labours Lost in Space’).

Unlike South Park, the jokes in Futurama are rarely predictable, rarely overdone, and most of the characters are endearing to the point where I don’t think any less of them for making an unsuccessful joke. Even Bender, the unkindest of the main characters, never reaches the point where his cruelty becomes obnoxious. He is certainly blunt, and there are a few times when he goes overboard, but there are plenty of moments when he behaves selflessly, too.

One nitpick that I have with the series is how unintentionally(?) pessimistic it feels with regards to the distant future. Certain phenomena are timely, like the dream commercials in ‘A Fishful of Dollars’, but it would be very surprising if delivery companies remained necessary an entire millennium from now, and capitalism existing for several more centuries sounds very unrealistic. Then again, there might be some underlying commentary here on how notoriously inaccurate future settings are, and this show is more about entertainment than accuracy anyway, so don’t take this complaint too seriously.

I could compliment this series every time that it makes me smile, but I’ll try to keep things simple by commenting on the bits that really get my attention. Get ready for a lengthy read as I’ll be reviewing two seasons at once here. Without further ado, let us jump into the unintentionally dystopian and surprisingly backward world of Futurama!

Space Pilot 3000: I like how modestly this improves Fry’s standard of living: aside from the luxuries that come with living in a distant future, he also gets better company and a less boring job, but he does not go from zero to hero either like that nerd in Heavy Metal. This makes the series feel less like a generic fairy tale.

Surprisingly, we get a few suicide jokes from 8:00–9:41. I would never judge somebody for finding these unfunny, but as an attempter myself I found them mildly amusing and Fry’s near-death experience added some excitement. I find it unlikely that suicide will remain a problem all the way into the 30th century, but that is just me nitpicking.

It is also here that we learn of Fry’s good nature. He could have left Leela in stasis for a millennium, but he generously lowered the time limit to five minutes. Coincidentally, Leela comes across as an adversary for most of this pilot, but her good side wins out in the end.

One uncool thing about this pilot: Leela’s boss is voiced by professional white guy Billy West. From what I can tell, West voices him throughout this series, too.

Ahh, Leonard Nimoy… we miss you. It’s a good thing that we’ll have your clone’s(?) head in the distant future to keep us company, though! This was a good design choice on the creators’ part: it makes the celebrity guest appearances feel more natural and less dated, since the implication here is that they all died in this timeline anyway before someone resurrected them.

All in all, a good start to a good series.

The Series Has Landed: Planet Express reaching the moon in two seconds sets the standards for what is mundane in this universe. This also gives us a little foreshadowing: what is exciting for Fry is unexciting for Leela, since all of this is normal for her.

I still remember those advertisements on Adult Swim with the helmeted alligators trying to chomp Fry’s lunar rover.

Fry, Leela, and Bender then rediscover the landing site of 1969, featuring a Yankee flag that changes its numbers of stars and stripes every time that we see it. In reality, its colors quickly faded after repeated exposures to unfiltered sunlight, and it would be shocking if it never disintegrated after centuries. I’m nitpicking again, though.

This is another good episode, and there is a sweet message implied therein: Leela repeatedly plays down the uniqueness of the moon, eventually defeating Fry’s enthusiasm for it, but she adjusts her tune as she notices how beautiful the surface looks in the Earth’s oceanic glow. It is a nice invitation to consider others’ points of view, because then you might notice something that you had never noticed before.

I, Roommate: Bender acts depressed when Fry diplomatically tells him that he cannot stay at his new apartment. This makes Bender seem more unreasonable, especially how he did not try to accommodate Fry when they slept in his cramped apartment.

That said, this remains a funny episode, and I appreciated the surprise ending. A worthy reward for Fry helping Bender reattach his antenna.

Love’s Labour Lost in Space: Our introduction to Zapp Brannigan, my least favorite character. At first, he seems mildly amusing: he is pompous blowhard and a secret coward. Still, I find it hard to like him, because already in his début he emotionally manipulates Leela and there is an implication that he got her drunk before sexually abusing her! This joke was much worse than anybody realized.

Although this episode did make me smile a few times, and making Nibbler a secret powerhouse was a good surprise, I have to say that this is the weakest entry in the first season. There is the sexual harassment which they reference repeatedly in this episode and some later ones, but there are less disturbing ones that don’t work either, like Nibbler’s bowel movement (which almost makes me want to roll my eyes). Had this episode never introduced us to a few recurring characters, I’d say that you would be fine skipping it.

Fear of a Bot Planet: I love it when they sneak Jewish references into their shows. We heard Bender shout ‘next year in Jerusalem’ in ‘The Series Has Landed’, but here we get a more obvious reference wherein he celebrates a fictitious holiday that he called Robanukah—complete with Ashkenazi music!

This story is kind of odd though since Leela and Fry are very clearly just humans wearing metal, yet for some unexplained reason the robots are unable to detect this by looking at them.

Nitpicking aside, there are some good jokes here, like the rôle-reversed horror film It Came from Planet Earth! (featuring a robot poorly dressed as a human), Leela having trouble with 3D glasses, an old computer slowly ‘judging’ two defendants, the quickly self-assembled stack of robots, and more. Highly recommended.

A Fishful of Dollars: See, I had a prediction that the squeaking at the beginning was not actually a couple having sex. What I was not expecting were the two springy robots being the source. The writers know how to make a joke unpredictable!

Likewise, the ‘commercialised dream’ joke aged like wine. (Unfortunately.)

Fry plays a Sir Mix-a-Lot song on his stereo. Leela turns it off and then tells Fry, ‘You can’t just sit here in the dark listening to classical music.’ I fucking love this joke!

The lesson at the end is how friends are more valuable than riches. Not a mind-blowing revelation, but it is inoffensive and agreeable. Overall, another worthwhile episode.

My Three Suns: I fecking love the joke where Fry arrogantly dismisses Leela’s advice on delivery, yet almost forgets to take the package with him.

A mostly fine episode, though it gets a little angsty between Leela and Fry, and seeing Fry’s peers torment him for several seconds is discomforting. Less importantly, the new planet that they explore looks surprisingly sparse and uninteresting.

Lastly, I have to add that in this story and ‘Bender Gets Made’, Bender’s culinary skills have little use, and the robot wash at the beginning was irrelevant to the rest of the script. Overall, I got several smiles from this episode, but I felt like it could have been better.

A Big Piece of Garbage: One of the few episodes that I still remember.

The biggest problem is that the plot makes little sense when you think about it. Aside from the carbon, what was stopping New York from incinerating its rubbish? Better yet, why didn’t 2050s New York launch its trash ball directly into the sun, like we saw in a later scene? Surely New Yorkers aren’t going to lose their common sense three decades from now… are they?

You can tell that this is an old episode because a newspaper printing press somehow still exists after one millennium! (Presumably, this was the last one and they only kept it around for sentimental reasons.)

If you can get past the casual ageism (Farnsworth is a supercentenarian, a source of many jokes here and throughout this series) along with the baffling plot, this is a good episode. It has some good jokes, and seeing Farnsworth redeem hisself is satisfying.

Hell Is Other Robots: Bender learns a lesson not to abuse ~~drugs~~ electricity, and we see him rescue his friends, confirming that he has a good side.

This episode is okay, but I found the ‘Robot Hell’ song too lengthy, and I would have appreciated this story more if it had something deeper to say. ‘I’ll never be too good or too evil again’ feels like such a shallow message with regards to serious subjects like indulging in vices or the fear of eternal torment.

A Flight to Remember: I did not realise until five minutes in that this was a parody of Titanic, something that I had not seen in a long time but was ridiculously sensational back in the late 1990s.

What I like about this episode is that it achieves what all referential humour ought to achieve: it’s funny even if you have no idea that it is referencing anything at all. You don’t need to know that there even is such a film as Titantic to laugh at, for example, Leela ordering Fry to unhand her shoulder, only to immediately put it back on when she sees Zapp Brannigan. I never understood why some critics gripe about outdated references in comedy when references to newer media are going to age anyway. In a good comedy like Futurama, aged references aren’t a problem at all; you don’t need to spot a reference for a joke to work.

‘Captain, may I have a word with you?’ ‘No.’ A good example of a simple, straightforward joke working perfectly. My favourite joke in Regular Show works similarly.

As is usual in this series, the writers punctuate the moments of drama with humor, like when the ship splits the exact same way as it does on a picture. Unlike Fired on Mars, there is rarely a moment of dead seriousness. It does get close at one point: it is a little sad for Bender, and us, when he permanently(?) loses a lover whom he just met for the first time, yet even here the showrunners lighten the mood by revealing her necklace to be fake, and Professor Farnsworth acknowledges the possibility of her survival before quietly admitting that he was being flippant. It would be uneasy to walk away from this episode feeling depressed.

One very minor gripe of mine—more of an observation, really—is how unlikely it is that polyamory would be either unpopular or inconceivable one millennium from now. Fry’s attempts to convincingly fake romantic relationships with both Amy Wong and Leela could have easily been solved if he pretended polyamory, but this idea never occurs to anybody.

Overall, this is worth a watch, even if you have never heard of the film Titanic before today. I remember bits of it, like when the bloke drew a portrait of his lover naked, and of course the famous ‘bow’ pose that they do at the tip of the ship, but the way that they parody these makes it easy for somebody unfamiliar with the source material to laugh at them. This is what a good parody looks like. None of that lazy, copycat ‘REMEMBER THAT‽ HERE IT IS IN A DIFFERENT CONTEXT!’ bullshit.

Mars University: One of the more obvious ways that this series has shown its age are the presence of large computer monitors and the newspapers that we saw in ‘A Big Piece of Garbage’. Given the writers’ cleverness, though, I’ll be surprised if we never see jokes about this in any of the later seasons.

Fry’s simplicity is also especially apparent in this episode. There are moments where he almost comes across as a better behaved Homer Simpson clone, although the two characters are more different than they are similar, perhaps even in terms of their cluelessness.

There is a subtle message here that there is nothing wrong with having average intelligence, and being an overachiever comes with disadvantages of its own, namely pressure to meet one’s high standards. In a way, it is almost like Flowers for Algernon, though I can’t say for sure if the similarities were intentional or not. Regardless, this is another fine episode. You might feel a little pessimistic to watch a comedy about a monkey, but thankfully there is nothing too disgusting in it… nothing that they showed on camera, anyway.

When Aliens Attack: I love how this series incorporates events from the past into its main timeline. It isn’t just one main character’s origin: it is also the origin of various other phenomena, from trash meteors to television interruptions.

The main characters (poorly) attempt to recreate lost media from the twentieth century; plan A of defeating the alien invaders failed, so they go for plan B: appeasement. This is another plot that would have been unlikely in a more realistic setting, as we are slowly approaching the point where A.I.-generated television programmes of passable quality shall be possible. How long before a computer program convincingly reconstructs a lost episode of Dr. Who? Well before the 2050s, no doubt. (And yes, I forgot to nitpick about the improbability of television interruptions one millennium later, too. No need to remind me.)

There is a critique herein about how generic American television is, and I laughed out loud at the joke at the end about the ol’ reset button. I sense a tinge of resent in the writers, but I don’t blame them.

Overall, this is another fun episode, but it does slow down a little as the main characters struggle to recreate lost media; irrespective of hindsight, I can’t help but suspect that maybe there could have been a funner solution to this than trying to and barely succeeding at creating a courtroom drama.

Fry & the Slurm Factory: Ugh, a cissexist joke within the first six minutes: Bender uses the F-ray and finds out that a feminine robot has… uh… atypical fembot anatomy, leading him to conclude that she is ‘no lady’. At least she gets to tell him off; it could have been worse.

‘Honey comes from a bee’s behind, milk comes from a cow’s behind, and have you ever used toothpaste?’ Not a reference to the lead in said substance, I presume, although it is extremely tempting to view this story as a commentary on the FDA’s inadequate regulations and enforcement.

This is another fairly fun episode, although I found the songs featuring the fake Oompa-Loompas tedious, and I would not recommend watching the latter half if you are trying to eat; there is more gross-out humor than usual, as you could likely tell by the bit that I quoted.

Onto season 2!

I Second That Emotion: This a story where Bender’s cruelty is more apparent than usual. Professor Fransworth forcibly installs an empathy chip on him, and it is a welcome break to see Bender behave sensitively. Yet, as we saw in ‘Fear of a Bot Planet’ and ‘Hell is Other Robots’, his cruelty has limits, and there is a moment when even his cruelty has a use: he eventually saves the day by teaching Leela to think more selfishly.

One joke that I like is when the mutants are expecting a monster to come down a tunnel, whereas, given what we knew up to that point, Nibbler’s appearance would have been unsurprising. Sure enough, Nibbler comes out of the tunnel… but pretty soon, so does the monster. This is a fine example of competent writers subverting the 50–50 expectations. Here, they have it both ways.

In conclusion, another worthwhile episode.

Brannigan, Begin Again: ‘We have a mission to further the noble cause of intergalactic peace!’ ‘Nope, watching cartoons.’ I feel called out right now.

One thing about this series that I dislike is when they reference the time when Leela slept with Brannigan, but from the way that it looked it ‘Love’s Labours Lost in Space’, I thought that she came under the influence of alcohol before he had his way with her, which would have explained why Leela screamed when she turned over and saw him sleeping next to her. I would argue that this is at least sexual harassment (if not rape), and repeatedly referencing the incident for cheap laughs only makes the joke even worse.

As you might have guessed, Zapp Brannigan is the only character whom I dislike. I understand that his douchiness is intended to inspire a modicum of contempt, but I honestly can’t tell if the showrunners seriously expected us to feel sorry for him after he lost his job.

I noticed that the female characters in this show and The Simpsons tend to be more reasonable than the male ones. I am sure that this is intended to be antistereotypical, and I generally don’t take cismisandry seriously, but I feel like promoting male rôle characters who are respectful and helpful to women would be healthier than ridiculing men as incompetent, overgrown boys. I don’t know; maybe I’m just overthinking this.

Just for the memes, I could say that I’m indifferent towards this episode, but in actuality I mostly enjoyed it. (Especially when Brannigan accidentally blew up the delegation. That was pretty fucking funny!)

A Head in the Polls: A satire of Yankee electoral politics, it appears. I had a feeling that the message at the end is going to disappoint me, and given that Nixon won by a single vote, the showrunners do seem to believe in the myth that voting in Yankee elections makes a difference—if only barely. The fact that the original candidates are literal clones makes me less than certain, though.

Given Nixon’s prominence in this story, it would be reasonable to expect the writer to be a boomer. J. Stewart Burns was born in 1969, and including the late 1960s as a criterion for boomerhood is a broad definition, but in any case it is hard to believe that he remembered anything about the Nixon régime. Why ridicule Nixon in 1999? My guess: Oliver Stone’s 1995 flick Nixon. Otherwise, it would be like satirizing George Bush today.

There are a few jokes that don’t work well for someone totally unfamiliar with Richard Nixon, but overall this is a fine episode.

Xmas Story: ‘There’s this girl who I really like but she thinks I’m a jerk. Can you help me?’ ‘Yeah, there’s a suicide booth in the food court. Though there’s a line this time of year.’ Part of me feels like I should never enjoy suicide jokes, especially since I was an attempter myself.

Normally I don’t enjoy Xmas specials (The Simpsons has some particularly dreadful ones), but this was actually really fun. It is rare for fiction to depict Santa Claus as an antagonist, and watching his pursuit of other characters made for some exciting action. It is nice to see somebody caring for Leela, too. So I have to say that this is another great episode and surprisingly good too given its theme.

Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?: Pity that this script does not pass the Bechdel test.

This is the twoth episode that has me shrugging my shoulders. It isn’t abysmal, but the unnecessary hostility along with Zoidberg’s quest to get laid and a space alien sexually harassing Fry all make it a relatively unpleasant experience. It feels like somebody has to sexually harass Fry and Zoidberg had to behave irrationally so that Zoidberg and Fry would have an excuse to fight. It also turned out that sex for Zoidberg’s species results in death, an important point unrevealed until the last several minutes. I was almost nodding off during the latter half.

My verdict on this one: you can take it or leave it.

Put Your Head on My Shoulders: I loved it when Leela bailed out Fry at the last minute, saving him the fate of having to witness heterosex.

It is mildly interesting to see Amy and Fry interact more, even though it feels a little forced here. If you can’t stand storylines where two characters constantly deny their feelings for each other—and I would not blame you—you may find this episode more tedious than fun, because it is so obvious that Leela and Fry desire each other, yet they find excuses to deny their feelings. You may also find the gimmick of putting Fry’s head next to Amy’s head a little tedious, and the writer sneaked a little cissexism into the script. Overall, though, this episode is all right.

Lesser of Two Evils: Somehow I feel like I should have seen the end coming a mile away, but it goes to show how skilled the writers are at subverting the audience’s expectations.

Raging Bender: This one has a few cissexist jokes, sadly, but the fights are interesting and seeing Leela triumph over a childhood adversary makes this a worthwhile story.

A Bicyclops Built for Two: Because of the invention of the ‘metaverse’, and the superabundance of socially awkward blokes, this episode has aged well. Although for some unexplained reason, Fry is quite insensitive in this script. Presumably, he obstructed another character because he is possessive of Leela, but he still comes across as overly mean.

This story can be somewhat confusing if you have seen an episode about Leela’s family, but it does not spoil the antagonist’s mystery either.

How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back: It still amuses me how Hermes’s back-up plan was to attempt suicide. What I find less amusing is how this is the twoth episode where somebody sexually harassed Fry.

It is abnormal to see a media depiction of bureaucracy that is not completely negative, and Hermes’s occupation was unclear to me before this story.

A Clone of My Own: Dang, this clone is dishing out some sick burns. It is surprising how well he turns out in the end, too, given his mistreatment in the middle of the story.

Another good aspect of this series is how it reuses things from previous episodes. In the last one, Leela’s former co-employés returned to play poker at her new company, and here we see the smelloscope as a utility for recovering Prof. Farnsworth.

The Deep South: I noticed that this show has a tendency to put the characters in a situation with a handful irrelevant jokes before getting back to the plot. Leela harpooning Bender, Zoidberg stealing Hermes’s bait, Bender’s potshots at Fry, and Leela accidentally catching a boot? Somebody could have sacrificed all of those jokes without inhibiting the story. It may sound like I am griping, but these jokes all have a charm to them even if they are irrelevant, so I’m not griping. This is only an observation.

I had a feeling that Fry was going to discover something wrong with his new home before quickly returning to his friends. The dealbreaker was a lot more straightforward than I expected, though.

Bender Gets Made: I have never been a fan of Italian-American crime dramata, but this is another fine episode. It is a little impressive how Bender managed to conceal his career in organized crime from his peers; in any other cartoon it would have been typical if the double life ended unglamorously.

The Problem with Popplers: Although this story is unsettling given the theme of eating live food, I still enjoyed it somewhat. What I liked about the ending is that it makes no judgements against veganism or vegetarianism. It would be easy to interpret it as an observation on omnivores’ somewhat arbitrary food prohibitions, but it would be a bit of a reach to say that it must have been an argument for veganism. In any event, this episode is fine—unless you are really squeamish about the concept of live food (and I would not blame you).

Mother’s Day: This script has surprisingly little to do with motherhood and more to do with romantic drama. Mom does not really explain why she felt the need to secretly trigger a robot riot, though I get the feeling that she was going to use them for a terroristic plot had Farnsworth not calmed her down. The story ends with a solution to the rioting, but the troubled relationship with Fransworth and Mom is intentionally unresolved, making it sad in a way. This is a slightly sad episode, but otherwise it is fine.

Anthology of Interest I: This plays out much like a ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episode from The Simpsons. Bender’s alternate timeline includes a half where he has (mostly) peaceful activities with Fry, and another half where he wrecks New New York and duels with a giant Zoidberg. Entertaining, though the downer ending was an odd choice that did not go well with the rest of the script.

Leela’s timeline is a story where she is slightly more impulsive, but it quickly turns into a massacre where she murders all of the main characters except for Fry. (I find it unlikely that giving her more impulsivity would have also made her a murderer, but whatever.) I still remember the surprise ending where she sleeps with Fry, and for some reason I had never forgotten that bit.

The next story is a timeline where Fry never travelled to the distant future. This is the ‘slowest’ of the stories featured, but it has some fun bits, like when Al Gore and a few other celebrities kidnap Fry and try to force him into the cryogenic pod. The ending is my favorite part: Fry’s refusal to enter a cryogenic pod triggers a black hole that literally annihilates everything in the universe except for Fry and the celebrities whom he met. This made me laugh out loud.

Professor Farnsworth then reveals that all of these timelines were theirselves part of a timeline where he invented a glove with a long finger. While I did not laugh out loud at this bit, it is still a charming joke that works fine.

War is the H-Word: Starship Troopers only now the satire is less subtle! (Not that that will stop militant anticommunists from missing the point again, of course.)

The Honking: They overdo the joke about Fry not being Bender’s best friend, but otherwise this is a good episode.

The Cryonic Woman: This was quite a finale: Fry and Bender wreck their workplace, they and Leela have to get new jobs, Fry rediscovers a long lost lover, they travel even further into the future and he finds out that she isn’t good after all, and then the surprises at the end… all well worth a watch, though the cliffhanger must have been annoying for anybody who eagerly awaited the next season.

It is a difficult decision, but I have to say that ‘Anthology of Interest I’ is my favorite of season 2. It shows Leela behaving more freely if harshly, and the ending to Fry’s timeline had me laughing out loud because of its sheer wackiness. The only episode of season 2 that I found unworthwhile was ‘Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?’ because of the sexual harassment, the characters’ needlessly unpleasant experiences, and the ending made the rest of the story feel like a waste of time. As I said, it is not abysmal (almost every single South Park episode is worse), but it is not much more than passable either; not the kind of episode that I’d love to rewatch.

One downside of this series is that some of the episodes may be too disgusting to watch while eating, depending on your own level of tolerance. Some of the episodes are fine or easy, like ‘A Flight to Remember’. Others involve phenomena like sewers, insects, alien bodily fluids, or (implied) heterosex, all of which could potentially spoil your appetite. This is not a serious criticism mind you, but if you like to have something on while you are eating then be careful.

I thank anybody who read this far, and I hope that I haven’t bored you. I promise that my review of season 3 shall be briefer than this one!