We’re just minutes away from the start of the new season of Futurama, a concept most people probably haven’t even thought about in over a year.
Despite being set in the distant future, Futurama is comfortable talking about modern life. Episodes about smartphones and 3D printers use sci-fi nonsense to complicate and entertain concepts. This has remained pretty consistent for years (and cancellations). But when it returned to Hulu last year, the show started to lose its balance, with topical jokes starting to overshadow the sci-fi gags. In its upcoming 12th season, it’s struggling even more to put a Futurama-esque twist on absurdist stories ripped from the news about NFTs and AI. The result is an uneven season that often feels like it’s missing the elements that made the show special in the first place.
NFTs are the most egregious example, and are featured heavily in the debut episode, making for a terrible first impression. The complex storyline sees Bender trying to make a quick buck selling his CryptoPunks-style collection, which somehow leads him on a journey to discover his roots in Mexico, while the rest of the Planet Express crew stage a heist to steal Bender’s NFT collection from a museum, only to be thwarted by the complexities of blockchain and digital ledgers.
The problem is, these aren’t some wacky Futurama-esque take on NFTs, but rather the regular NFTs we know today: awful art tied to digital receipts. The episode spends an awful lot of time explaining the concept, which, to be fair, is hard to do succinctly. There are barely any jokes or exposition, just the assumption that NFTs themselves are enough to make people laugh.
Over a decade ago, when we all thought Futurama was completely over, executive producer and head writer David X. Cohen explained to me why the show was able to successfully incorporate modern issues into its retro-futuristic world. “It’s always nice when the real world can provide an idea for an episode,” he says. “Setting a show 1,000 years in the future doesn’t mean we don’t comment on modern society. We just take a step away.” As the NFT episode proves, that “step away” part is crucial; without it, the episode would be a bunch of lame jokes and terribly outdated.
I’ve seen the first six episodes of this season (out of 10 in all), and the second half is a little better. There’s a parody of The Squid Game that explores Fry’s childhood through weird time travel, and a fast-fashion episode that turns Cara Delevingne into Frankenstein’s monster and the professor into a fashion icon. These aren’t the best examples of Futurama; the jokes are hit-or-miss, and most of them lack the heart that makes the show so down-to-earth. But at least it understands the original premise of Futurama: using this weird future as a lens to exaggerate modern issues.
The series’ least original episode sees an AI chatbot transform into Leela’s jealous friend, but not in this one, which feels like every AI movie trope crammed into 20 minutes of cartoon time, and considering Futurama is filled with sentient robots, treating AI as something entirely new is pretty odd, too.
Hulu promises that the season will explore “the next chapter of Fry and Leela’s fated, timeless romance,” so maybe the later episodes will have more heart and wit. But from what I’ve seen, the balance is just way off: too much focus on topicality and not enough attention to the quirky humor, enduring characters, and warmth that’s made it all work so well thus far. Like the rest of the world, Futurama should have put NFTs behind it.
Season 12 of Futurama will begin streaming on Hulu on July 29th.
