By The Plaid Adder

Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com

10. The Simpsons is losing it.

The last couple years it's just been getting randomer and randomer, and while I enjoy absurdist humor, I also think the show really lost something when it moved away from its focus on the dysfunctions at the heart of the Simpsons family. Of course, the reason it did that is that no comedy can survive popularity in America without losing its ironic/satiric edge. Archie Bunker and All in the Family set the precedent--Archie started out as an unrepentant and unrecoverable bigoted bastard, and ended up as a "likeable bastard." Somehow no matter how hard the writers try, the audience always wants to recuperate that main character, and eventually the writers give up and play along. The same thing has happened on The Simpsons, where the bitter satire of the first few seasons (in which the whole point was that Homer really was a bastard, especially to his children and his wife) has mellowed so that Homer is now, basically, a likeable if pathetic bonehead who may do insensitive, mean, or irresponsible things but whose heart is in the right place. Now that the show has been embraced by mainstream culture and the black humor has been leached out of it, it's kind of degenerating into a string of bizarre parodies. After the episode where Homer becomes Quimby's bodyguard--a parody of the Whitney Houston film The Bodyguard, a movie so bad that most people never saw it, and which in any case has been relegated to the bargain aisle at Blockbuster for many years now, I quit watching.

This means that Futurama is a) funnier and b) darker than the new improved Simpsons. It has not yet attained the rip-snortin', gut-bustin' heights of the first few Simpsons seasons, but it's hitting its stride.

While I found the pilot funny in many places (especially the chase through the Head Museum), it was dragged down by the necessity of introducing the premise, the characters, and their life stories. In a half-hour, that didn't leave much room for much else--they had to a) get Fry to the year 3000, using a plot device so thin you could sneeze through it; b) introduce him to Leila; c) introduce him to Bender; d) get them all to the point where they were willing to sign on with Fry's great-to-the-tenth-power uncle as the new crew of his intergalactic cargo vessel. Unfortunately this involved a pretty cheesy plot about determinism and career chips, which on the one hand introduced the future as a not very nice place, and on the other hand led to a lot of pretty sappy dialogue for Fry and Leila about freedom and choice.

Once the premise has already been established, the show gets to be a lot more fun and a lot less cheese-filled, although Fry's doe-eyed fidelity to the ideals of the 20^th century can sometimes get really annoying. Fortunately, Fry is only one piece in an ensemble cast, and most of the other characters are more interesting. (Most.)

 7. The animation format means that you can regularly do things that most sci-fi shows can only do rarely and at great expense.

There are a lot of reasons why animation helps, but I'll give you the three biggest: aliens, aliens, aliens. As we devotees of Star Trek et al. know, when you do a show with human actors there is an irresistible tendency to fill your universe with humanoid aliens--since turning a human actor into something that doesn't look humanoid is a difficult and frustrating process. Well, for all you folks who have become increasingly restive with the old "stick on a prosthetic nose and put some funky crap in the hair" school of alien design, Futurama's good for what ails ya. My favorite alien so far is the ship's doctor, a kind of lobsterlike creature in a lab coat. What I like about him is that he is really an alien, and is obviously having some difficulty adjusting. For instance, like most doctors he knows a lot more about his own physiology than he does about that of other species, so that he tends to forget, for instance, that Fry has an endoskeleton, only one mouth, etc. He also has a hard time with human food and tableware ("I'll have a jumbo squid log, please…all right, then how about one of your young on a roll? Look, just give me something crawling with parasites."). But the guest aliens have also been a motley and interesting sort, including a "pure energy" being who tries to pick Leila up at a bar ("I understand. Someday you will evolve beyond your corporeal body, and when you do, I hope you will pick up the phone") and a race of shape-shifting beings made entirely of water.

On the one hand, it is clearly inspired by ST and its various incarnations, and really, aren't we all. On the other, it satirizes all the stuff that bugged me about TOS and, to a lesser extent, TNG, including: 

• The hypocrisy of the "Prime Directive," which Kirk et al. violated whenever they felt that their fidelity to "human" (read: American) values required them to do so. The best example of this is the episode in which the crew encounters Zap Brannigan, a thinly disguised Captain Kirk figure who prevents them from going on their mission to rescue a bunch of animals from an imploding planet because it would violate the prime directive (here called "Brannigan's Law"). Leila points out that the planet has already been interfered with, since the reason it's imploding is that the center was mined for starship fuel. Brannigan says, "Yes, and it was mined by members of the [whatever their version of the Federation is]. I don't pretent to understand Brannigan's law, I just enforce it."
• The sexism. Mainly this has been addressed in the Zap Brannigan episode, in which we get to see the "making it with an alien babe" plot line from the alien babe's perspective. It's not pretty.
• The redshirt thing. My favorite moment in the Zap Brannigan ep was when Brannigan told Leila he was "prepared to send wave after wave of my own men" into battle on her behalf, then shouted, "Right, men?" into the mess hall. After a silence, someone yelled back, "You suck!" Finally, the redshirt has been given a voice. In the other episodes, the voice of the redshirt is usually ascribed to Bender, who greets the new announcement of a mission to someplace like the Galaxy of Terror with a healthy, "Aw, crap."
• Human supremacism. So far my favorite critique of this is the episode where they travel to the planet of robot separatists. While in some places the ep is a not-too-subtle attack on liberal/radical racial politics (Bender's whining about the robots at the baseball stadium is sort of a cheap shot at the rhetoric of civil rights/affirmative action, especially given the fact that by now Bender has established his character as a lazy, drunken, vice-addicted loudmouth), it does also show how unthinkingly the human characters assume their own supremacy, and how much that pisses the other characters off.

I do not understand why I like this character, but I do. The reason I don't understand it is that I know that if Bender were a human, he would piss me off. As I said, he's lazy, sleazy, and obnoxious, plus I don't really subscribe to the whole "drunk people are funny" school of comedy. And yet I'm really growing fond of him. I think this may be because in part Bender is a parody of all those improbably anthropomorphized robots from sci-fi TV and film--Robbie, C3PO, Data. On one level, Bender takes the whole Pinnochio "real live boy" syndrome to ridiculous lengths--he's so carnal-minded that his main preoccupations are booze and sex. On the other hand, the writers also remember that he's a robot. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the opening sequence on the Trip To The Forbidden Zone episode, which has Bender going through an automated Robot Wash, singing "Car Wash" and getting off on the Undercarriage Wash; or the scene where he's surprised drooling over robot pornography (which turns out to be an electrician's schematic). Or maybe the best example is the whole "don't touch my three beautiful robot daughters" subplot from the moon episode. The plot anthropomorphizes Bender and the robot daughters, but this is counteracted by the fact that one of the daughters is called The Crushinator, and looks like a giant trash-compactor on wheels. When Fry asks, "You didn't touch the Crushinator, did you?" Bender says, "Of course not! A woman that fine you gotta romance!"

The critique of global capitalism is inherent in the premise--in this future, capital rules, and the place is run not by a totalitarian regime but through large intergalactic combines like the Mom Corporation. The anchovies episode did a particularly good job with this, introducing us to the Mom character. Mom is the human face of capitalism--a nice, grandmotherly old lady with a charming smile and a comfy lap. At least until she takes off the Old Lady suit, at which point she looks like a cross between Gary Oldman's Dracula and Cruella DeVille. You gotta love that. It's also part of the whole "Fry as intergalactic delivery boy" setup. The "seek out new life and new civilizations" rhetoric is stripped down to its cynical core: we're out there to make money, and if that means putting your insignificant lives at risk, well, there's more crew where you came from.

It also does an interesting job of dealing with difference, partly because there is more difference (see the point above about the interesting aliens). Viz. the problems the poor lobster doctor runs into (in one scene at the bar, he attempts to pick up his drink in one claw, loses his grip, spills the thing, and sinks down with a resigned and dejected little sigh), or Leila's frustation with her love life (her being one-eyed seems to be a deterrent. Bender suggests that instead of looking for a nice guy with one eye, she should find a nice guy with two eyes and poke one of them out).