Matt Groening did not have to risk making another television series.
The alternative weekly cartoonist turned king of mainstream pop culture already had in his creative bedpost the very deep notch for “The Simpsons,” widely considered one of the best ever.
The fact that “Futurama” was also to be animated and that the characters, because they are drawn by Groening, would inevitably look a little like Bart, Homer, Marge, etc. only increased the risks.
No matter how good “Futurama” was, there would be comparisons and, ultimately, the second series would be found wanting next to the first.
But the amazing thing, at least in the crackling first episode (7:30 p.m. Sunday, WFLD-Ch. 32), is how good “Futurama” is. In this year of new prime-time animation (“Dilbert,” “The PJs,” “Family Guy” and many more on the drawing board for fall), it is easily the pick of the litter.
The story of a 1999 pizza delivery guy named Fry who gets accidentally cryogenically frozen on New Year’s Eve and wakes up a millennium later, it is overflowing with sly references, instantly affecting characters and intensely clever imaginings of what a future might bring.
There is, for instance, the Head Museum, where the heads of 20th Century personalities are preserved in liquid, ready to dispense their wisdom to visitors. Leonard Nimoy’s refuses, out of either artistic pride or for sound biological reasons, to do the “Star Trek” hand thing, Richard Nixon’s remains hilariously true to character, and Dick Clark’s continues to host New Year’s Eve.
There is the vaguely Orwellian predestiny of life (underwhelming but ubiquitous slogan: “You gotta do what you gotta do”) amid a messy metropolis (New New York) that has personal jetpacks and levitating bicycles and a giant, above-ground Habitrail of a subway system.
And there are robots everywhere, functioning as Terminator-like cops, as the new society’s worker drones and, in the case of Fry, as sidekicks.
Because his show is science fiction but will also tweak the genre, Groening has told Wired magazine, he even prepared a character “who will anticipate fan complaints about the show’s inconsistencies and then will address them within the show.”
It is this feeling of having too much to say, of being able to toss off jokes in incidental places such as background billboards and pizza box tops, that is the truest measure of “Futurama’s” quality. As on “The Simpsons,” there is never the feeling of a joke being settled on, but rather it is worked over (and over and over) until just right. And there is the sense of a masterful hand guiding things, making creative choices that are both surprising and right.
Fry (given a gee-whiz voice by cartoon veteran Billy West) enters the only moderately brave new world excited by the opportunity to remake his life, but instantly gets some depressing news. Leela (“Married . . . with Children’s” Katey Sagal), the monocular but otherwise attractive woman who is his Fate Assignment Officer, informs him that his perfect and therefore only possible job, a thousand years later, is, again, delivery boy.
Rebelling against this pronouncement, Fry runs, meeting his soon-to-be pal, the robot Bender, in line at one of the city’s popular automated suicide booths. Bender, named not for his problem drinking but for what he is programmed to do to metal, is the Bart Simpson of the group, able to embrace every bad habit (kleptomania, pornography, booze, cigars) without risking protest from viewers because, as Groening has said, he is just a robot.
The fourth member of the eventual core group, who will together form the intergalactic delivery service Planet Express, is Fry’s “149-year-old great-great-etc.-nephew” Professor Hubert Farnsworth, a man less impressed with his spaceship than with his drawer containing different lengths of wire.
And although they don’t show up in episode one, a rich, “Simpsons”-like panoply of supporting characters are waiting in the wings, including Dr. Zoidberg, a lobster-like physician; Zapp Brannigan, an egotistical space pilot; and Amy Wong, a rich-girl intern.
Groening, working with David X. Cohen, a former “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Simpsons” writer with a techno-geek’s academic credentials, shows he has learned the most important “Simpsons” lesson well: The more human the backdrop, the better the comedy can be.
In “The Simpsons,” the informing notion is the struggle of the nuclear family to survive 20th Century pressures and its own members’ messy humanity. In “Futurama,” it is the poignancy of Fry wanting to slip his perennial loser status and in his periodic realizations that, having left his social context behind, he is truly alone to discover what has happened in the world.
After two Sundays in the post-“Simpsons” time period, Fox will move “Futurama” to the much less popular Tuesdays, where it will join “King of the Hill” and “The PJs” in an attempt to create an all-animation night.
And while the network’s initial commitment to Groening was for only 13 episodes, or half a traditional season, it is easy to anticipate “Futurama” being around to see a good deal of the future.
