Futurama :: "The Impossible Stream" S11E01

© 20th Television

Good news, everyone! 'Futurama' is back!
by Chuck Duncan

Cast: John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr, David Herman
Rating: ★★★

After being cryogenically frozen for a decade, someone, somewhere, somehow thought that now would be the perfect time to resurrect the classic animated series Futurama, and after a slight bump in the road that might have caused a major malfunction involving voice actor John DiMaggio (Bender), the series has made its triumphant return on Hulu. Now if you've been keeping track, this ain't the first time the show has been revived since it first debuted in 1999 -- yes, LAST century! -- on the FOX Television Network, looking to cash in on the popularity of The Simpsons, and enlisting that show's creator to craft a companion series (one could almost look at as how The Jetsons came along after the success of The Flintstones). After FOX cancelled the show, it was revived in a series of direct-to-DVD movies between 2004 and 2009, and that led to a series revival on Comedy Central from 2010-2013. This is by far the longest of the hiatuses, but the show is back now on Hulu -- so the show has really covered all media outlets at this point -- and fans should loudly rejoice.

The premiere episode is titled 'The Impossible Stream', and as with all great Futurama scripts this one -- by Patric M. Verrone (written by), Shirin Najafi (executive story editor) and Cody Ziglar (executive story editor) -- takes aim at the show itself and the company that brought it back from the dead, as well as the new normal of binge-watching a TV show. But first the episode has to completely undo everything that transpired at the end of what was then the series finale that left Fry and Leela happily coupled but stuck in a time loop while everything else was frozen. The episode starts with Professor Farnsworth resetting the time to the moment just before Fry and Leela froze time, so their decades-long relationship may have been forgotten but they still certainly have feelings for each other. But, the world is spinning for them again so we just move on as if nothing happened, although the characters make references to feeling different (and Bender's beer is stale). Also, Farnsworth looks noticeably older, which he corrects with de-aging cream, but he spent a millennia digging through time tunnels so he shouldn't have aged at all (Fry and Leela also aged but the reset took them back to their younger selves at the end of the 10th season). Will these small changes to the timeline have a ripple effect moving forward?

The writers do spend a lot of time mining a lot of laughs from the characters constantly making references to 'being rebooted'. The whole episode is actually an joke about TV revivals in general, but Futurama and its new overlords are the shiny metal butt of the joke. And that is no more apparent than when Fry sees the calendar date of July 24, 2023, meaning he's been in the future -- or what everyone else calls the present -- for 23 years and has accomplished nothing. So he sets a goal to watch every TV series ever produced, and while Bender laughs at him, Leela is the patient girlfriend who says she will support whatever goals he sets for himself. Of course she does this with her patented heavy sigh ... and then tries to get Hermes to talk Fry out of it but he refuses to do Leela's "girlfriend duty". Fry, nonetheless, signs up with the fourth most popular streaming service, Fulu, sets his age at 1000+ (technically correct) and uses the same 1077 password (the price of pizza and a soda in 1999. Luckily he has a head start, having watched and hate-watched such classics as Stranger Fonts, Smelly in Paris, and How I Met Your Smizmar, so his first deep dive is The Scary Mirror, which is a parody of Netflix's Black Mirror (whereas in previous seasons there was a show called The Scary Door which parodied The Twilight Zone). Amy says this is a show that makes you think so Fry switches to The Great Neptunian Bam-Off and Humorbot 5.0: Stand-Up Special.

With all of Fry's binging, all he's left with is the final season of soap opera All My Circuits ... which had been cancelled two or three times so Bender needed to clarify which 'final season' this was. Fry says it's the final final season from a decade earlier but becomes dejected when he learns it's comprised of 13,000 episodes. He will never be able to get through it all, and gives up his dream. Leela suggests the use of new binging technology, which horrifies Amy as she reminds Leela that would require Fry to be connected to the 'binging goggles' that drill directly into the visual cortex. As the Professor warns Fry about the goggles ... well, he's already got them drilling into his skull. The Planet Express crew straps him into a Still Suit and places him in Farnsworth's Binge-O-Lounger as he bids farewell as the binging begins. The soap stars our old robot friend Calculon. After months of binging, Fry's bodily functions are normal, but he's lost touch with reality and his brain waves match the TV signal. If he runs out of episodes, his consciousness will be severed.

© 20th Television

This is where the writers get to poke a lot of fun at the reboot of Futurama as Amy suggests going to the Fulu execs and asking them to produce new episodes of a show that's already been cancelled three times and hasn't had a new episode in ten years. The Fulu Execubots pass even though Leela tells them the show has a devoted fan base. The execs respond that those fans rarely buy anything from their advertisers. But Fry has actually been buying the advertised produced from within his suit, so the bots order 20 episodes (not so coincidentally the same number the Hulu execs ordered for Futurama), and Bender suggests an option for 20 more. "And maybe a movie", adds Leela. The only problem is that Calculon is dead, but the execubots say anything is negotiable. They call down to Robot Hell, New Jersey, and cut a deal with Robot Devil for scale plus ten percent, and Calculon is loaded into the Resurrection Cannon.

On set, Bender volunteers to be Calculon's assistant and Leela gets a call from Farnsworth that Fry only has two episodes left ... and one is a clip show. Leela says it's impossible to film an hour-long show every hour forever, but Farnsworth reminds her that if Law & Order can do it, so can she. Leela jumps into action as the new executive producer and they get going but the Professor notices Fry is watching the episodes at 2 times the normal speed. He calls Leela with the update and she asks him to slow the stream but Farnsworth worries that in Fry's current binge-state, that could kill him so they need to produce episodes faster to meet Fry's demands. The director agrees to direct at double speed for double pay, but the pace is taking a toll on the writers' room (which may be a She-Hulk in-joke) which contains the heads of David X. Cohen and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Bender is hired as the show's new writer and proclaims, "Hello, Writer's Guild." Oh, the irony at this moment in time. The speed of production causes the director to have a heart attack, so Leela has to take over, frantically calling out directions as the scenes progress in a rapid pace.

But the execubots arrive on set with some news -- the show is cancelled, again. Bender questions how one show can get cancelled so many times by so many networks as the bots strike the set. Farnsworth tells Leela to kidnap the actors and bring them back to the Planet Express building, hoping that they can act out the final scenes in person to help ease Fry's mind back into the real world. They slow Fry's stream down to normal speed, and as Scruffy the janitor provides the music, the opacity of his goggles is shifted so he can see the actors in front of him performing along with the images on the TV screen. Unfortunately, Fry's cigar accidentally lights a stick of dynamite used as a prop, causing a massive explosion and setting Fry's suit on fire. Amy tries to extinguish the blaze ... with battery acid, but that just burns the suit and the lounger to a crisp. Leela is beside herself with grief until ... Fry enters the room, informing them he got out of the suit two days earlier. Overjoyed, Leela promises to never encourage Fry again. Fry notes that he just couldn't get through the last batch of episodes because the writing and direction took a sudden downhill turn. Bender notes that he never went over time -- just as the Futurama executive producer credits appear.

The credits are interrupted by news anchors Linda and Morbo with a special report on a Presidential Summit on the dangers of streaming television. Fry is being questioned by President Richard M. Nixon's head, and Fry says a show should not be rebooted if the quality isn't going to be there, and he encourages viewers to binge responsibly, the same way they smoke cigarettes or drink bleach. Fry's recommendation is to binge ten episodes at a time. No more, no less. (Futurama's first batch of episodes will consist of -- ten.) Fry also notes that any show that truly cares about its audience should -- must -- be cancelled every few years because it's the right thing to do.

© 20th Television

If this first episode is any indication, everyone involved is heeding that advice with the quality of the writing razor sharp, and the voice performances by the entire original cast on point (and seriously, who would or could have taken over the role of Bender if all parties hadn't come to whatever agreement was made to get him on board?). I seriously started smiling from the second that classic theme song and those opening credits started and I didn't stop until the end. Watching the episode late at night, I also had to stifle many loud bursts of laughter (I was told the next day it sounded like I was watching the funniest thing I've ever seen) and that was all I was hoping for out of this revival. The premiere episode really was perfection. I have had an opportunity to view the next five episodes and while humorous, I did not find the following three that laugh-out-loud funny (there are laughs and some real heart-tugging moments, but we'll talk about those in recaps to come), but episodes five and six are quite funny. Some reviews have complained that all we're getting from this batch of episodes are Futurama's 'greatest hits' with episodes centered around Nibbler, Mom and Robot Santa, and one that is a direct sequel to a previous episode from the past. I don't see what the problem is with that. Is it too fan servicey? Maybe. Will it scare off new viewers unfamiliar with the show? It shouldn't. It should make them want to watch the previous seasons ... which are all streaming on Fulu. I mean Hulu.

New episodes of Futurama will stream Mondays on Hulu.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn't exist.