Matt Groening’s future is as stupid as the present, and for its first five seasons that is a first-rate joke, told by a cast of voices few cartoons can match. Later revivals are warmer than they are funny. Start at the beginning.
Matt Groening’s second animated series takes a dim New York delivery boy, freezes him for a thousand years and wakes him in a future exactly as stupid as the present. That is the joke, and it has lasted: eleven seasons since 28 March 1999, with a gap of nearly eight years after the fifth and another of eleven after the seventh. The first five seasons are some of the funniest animated television we know. The rest is a pleasant place to visit. We recommend it, with the caveat that where you start matters more than usual.
The voices carry more than the drawing does. Billy West plays four principal parts, Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Zoidberg and Zapp Brannigan, and you would not guess they share a throat: Fry a nasal, hopeful whine, the Professor a quaver that falls asleep mid-sentence, Zoidberg a wet gargle, Brannigan a ham captain in love with his own voice. John DiMaggio’s Bender is a robot who drinks, steals and regards humans as furniture, and he gets the largest share of the good lines. Katey Sagal’s Leela is the only adult in the building and plays it straight, which is why the others land.
The writers, with David X. Cohen, Ken Keeler, Patric M. Verrone and Bill Odenkirk among the regulars, have one method when it is working: take a stupid premise and follow it with complete logic until it says something true. Maurice LaMarche’s Morbo, a green alien who reads the news and announces humanity’s coming destruction between items, is a sharper joke about television than most satire manages in an hour. Tress MacNeille’s Mom, a sweet old lady in public and a foul-mouthed industrialist in private, is the show’s whole view of business in one character. The backgrounds are dense with signs and adverts that reward pausing.
The look is mixed on purpose. The people are drawn flat and rubbery in the Groening manner; the ships and the skyline of New New York have the hard, clean edges of early computer rendering, so the future always looks more solid than the fools living in it. Christopher Tyng’s theme is a burbling piece of lounge electronica, and his cues under the episodes move things along without telling us when to laugh. Paul D. Calder’s cutting keeps a sight gag on screen for exactly as long as it takes to see it. Directors including Rich Moore, Peter Avanzino and Susie Dietter shoot space quiet and wide, from outside the ship, which is what makes the idiocy inside it funny.
We should say what it did to us. There is an episode about the dog Fry left behind in 1999. We will not describe its last two minutes. We will say that we sat quite still when they finished, that Tyng’s music does most of the work, that the script drops every joke for the final stretch, and that a cartoon about a robot who steals wallets had no business doing that to us. It is what the show could do when it chose to take Fry seriously, a man who has lost everyone he knew. It does not choose often, which is right.
The later seasons are the caveat. Seasons six and seven run to 26 episodes each and feel it: the premises get lazier and the Fry and Leela romance is stretched past what the characters can bear. The seasons from 2023 onward are shorter, ten episodes apiece, and lean on topical parody, a poor fit for a show whose best jokes were about things that do not change. Most critics who reviewed those revivals said much the same, and we have no quarrel with them. Nobody in the later runs is bad; the cast is the same and still expert. The trouble is that the show now knows it is loved, and plays to the people who love it.
Against Groening’s own The Simpsons it is the smaller and, in its first five seasons, the better-made thing: tighter plots, a cast that fits in one room, a city rather than an everytown. Start with the first episode, in which Fry falls into the freezer, and keep going until you notice you have stopped laughing. You will get further than you expect. It carries a 12 certificate, which seems about right for a show in which the doctor is a lobster and the robot is drunk.
