Review: Futurama Season 6

Family Guy sucks. This is a position I've held for at least five years, though it's become a less controversial statement with each new season. Though the show itself is the antithesis of humor, there is one thing that Family Guy has done that is admirable: after being understandably cancelled in 2001, the show was resurrected in 2005 after strong DVD sales. It showed that a fan base can support a show, even when the network cannot. With this precedence, it opened the door to other wrongly-cancelled shows that were cancelled. Much better shows like Futurama, the sci-fi successor to The Simpsons from Matt Groening and writer David X. Coen that was preempted so many times by FOX that there were enough leftover episodes to create a fifth season once the show was cancelled after four production seasons.

I remember watching that first episode. I was in my final months of middle school at the time, and over the next five years, I watched and laughed with the show, memorized songs, and recorded episodes on VHS. I have an officially-licensed shirt. I have all of the action figures, both the four from the original run, and the 12+ in the recent re-release. I signed pointless online petitions when the show was first cancelled, I played through the mediocre PS2 game, I became teary-eyed as I watched The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings, and I did the same when I saw the character introduction sequence in Bender's Big Score.

It's safe to say I have an emotional investment in Futurama. It's the one that first taught me about the cruel wasteland that can be the television landscape. Since the show first left, however, I've watched dozens of other shows meet their ends, either from old age or forceful ejection, and I've seen a lot of comedy, which is why I'm find myself laughing out loud less and less at each new Futurama project, starting with the DVD movies and ending with the first two episodes of Season 6, the first of which premiere tomorrow night on Comedy Central.

I could try to rationalize why I feel this way - I think meta humor can be funny in small doses, but when taken too far, it's no longer so much of a jab in the audience's direction so much as it is the writers taking you by the shoulders and shouting in your face "WE ARE MAKING FUN OF SOMETHING IN REAL LIFE." (Arrested Development, in its final season, also started becoming a victim of this). Case in point - the wormhole through which they travel at the end of the last movie / beginning of the episode was described by Farnsworth as a "Central Channel" to which Hermes replies "hilarious!" and The Professor then says that yes, it is indeed a "Comedy Central Channel". I GET IT!

The first episode deals with wrapping up the events of the last movie and ensuring everyone is back to their old selves. There is a visual gag early in the episode that caused me to laugh out loud, though the remainder of the episode gave me nothing but some smirks. The second episode was no different, though I found the premise to be a little more enjoyable, even if the parody was again pretty blatant. It seems to me that the best episodes are the ones that either dealt with the Fry-Leela relationship (though even now I think it has run its course), or the ones that dealt with the mythology of the show (The Why of Fry comes to mind).

It's a television miracle that Futurama has received this many chances, and I hope that they will be renewed again after Comedy Central airs the next two seasons, but I can't put forward the emotion and devotion into one show like I used to: I'm juggling more than three dozen scripted series over the course of the year, and shows come and go all the time. Futurama finally has a fair shake on TV, but regardless of the outcome, we can all be proud that there was one good thing that came from the inception of Family Guy.