It only takes a few minutes before FuturamaThe new season kicks off by explaining non-fungible tokens, or nfts, a concept most people probably haven't thought about for over a year.
Despite being set in the distant future, Futurama It's always been comfortable commenting on modern life. There have been episodes about smartphones and 3D printers that use sci-fi nonsense to complicate concepts in a way that makes them funny. That's largely remained true through many years (and cancellations). But in its revival on Hulu last year, the show really started to mess up the balance, and its topical jokes began to overshadow the sci-fi jokes. The upcoming 12th season struggles even more to find a Futurama-A twist on the absurd, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about nfts and ai. This makes the season uneven and often feels like it's missing what originally made the show so special.
nfts are the most glaring example, and they also feature heavily in the debut episode, making for a terrible first impression. The convoluted plot involves Bender selling a CryptoPunks-style collection to make a quick buck, which somehow leads him on a quest to uncover his origins in Mexico. Meanwhile, the rest of the Planet Express crew attempts a heist to free Bender’s nft collection from an art museum, only to be thwarted by the complexities of blockchain and digital ledgers.
The problem is that they are not any kind of peculiarities. Futurama They face nfts: They’re just regular nfts as we know them now, terrible art connected to a digital receipt. The episode devotes an irritatingly large portion of its running time to explaining the concept (which, to be fair, is hard to do succinctly) without offering much in the way of jokes or commentary. It just assumes that nfts themselves are enough to make people laugh.
More than a decade ago, when we all thought Futurama Executive producer and head writer David x. Cohen explained to me how the show managed to successfully translate modern issues into its retrofuturistic world. “We always like when the real world gives us ideas for episodes,” he said. “Setting the show 1,000 years in the future doesn’t mean you’re not going to comment on current society — it just makes it one step further.” As the nft episode demonstrates, it’s that “one step further” part that’s so important. Without it, the episode is a bunch of lame jokes that are also painfully dated.
I've seen the first six episodes of the season (there will be 10 in total) and things get a little better later on. There's a Squid Game Parody that explores Fry's childhood through a kind of strange time travel and a fast fashion episode that turns Cara Delevingne into Frankenstein's monster and the professor into a style icon. I wouldn't say these are examples of Futurama At best, the jokes are either good or bad and most lack the essence that keeps the show going. But at least they get the point across. FuturamaThe original premise of 's: to use this strange future as a lens to exaggerate modern problems.
This is less true in the least original episode of the bunch, when the show turns an ai chatbot into Leela's jealous friend. It's pretty much every ai movie trope packed into 20 minutes of animation. It's also pretty odd to approach ai as something new at all given Futurama It is full of sentient robots.
There may be more heart and wit in later episodes, as Hulu promises the season will explore “the next chapter in Fry and Leela’s fateful, twisted romance.” But from what I’ve seen, the balance is too off. There’s too much focus on being topical and not enough on the eccentric humor, long-running characters, and warmth that have made it all work so well before. Like the rest of the world, Futurama We should have left nfts in the past.
Futurama Season 12 begins streaming on Hulu on July 29.
