What Futurama Did

The show opens with a kid from the 20th century waking up a thousand years later, and his first move is to find the one person he knew before the time jump, but she’s been dead for a thousand years. So he gets a job at a delivery company, gets adopted by a robot, and everyone treats the whole thing like a joke, which it is, but also isn’t.

Futurama ran for a few seasons before Fox killed it, brought it back, then killed it again because nobody at the network understood what they had. A cartoon about displacement and loneliness that was also genuinely funny. There’s the famous episode with Fry’s dog—and I’m not spoiling it, but if you’ve seen it you know what I mean. The show had permission to hurt you, to be more than just jokes about robots and space.

What made it work was how it never tried to make that sadness do the heavy lifting. It was content to be stupid and funny, and the loneliness was built into the premise like a background color. One minute it’s a joke about bending metal, the next you remember Fry can never go home, and that’s the actual architecture of what you’re watching.

Everything undersold itself. The premise could’ve been a tearjerker if it wanted to, but instead it was just a cartoon about a guy stuck in the future, going to work, hanging out with a robot and an alien, and occasionally remembering that he lost everything and there’s nothing he can do about it.