FUTURAMA: "The Impossible Stream"

I was a huge fan of The Simpsons growing up. Then, shortly before I began high school, Matt Groening created a new show: Futurama. I fell in love with it from the first episode, and eagerly watched it throughout its twenty-some years of irregular existence. I stopped watching The Simpsons over a decade ago, but Futurama has a special place in my heart. Still, I was cautiously optimistic when I heard it was being brought back again. I think that Futurama has been top-notch until now, but every show will eventually dip in quality if it goes on long enough. Would season 8 be the year that does Futurama in?

The first episode of the newest revival, "The Impossible Stream," involves Phillip J. Fry's decision to set a life's goal for himself: to watch every TV show ever made. Despite the daunting set-up, much of this episode focuses specifically on the FINAL show that Fry has to binge: the in-universe soap opera, All My Circuits, which has over ten thousand episodes. (This was not comedic exaggeration on the shows' part; a few real-life soap operas have episode counts in that range.)

Eventually, Professor Farnsworth discovers that Fry's been watching TV for so long that he's begun to lose his grip on reality and will die when the binge ends. The solution is for his friends to make sure that All My Circuits continues to make episodes so that Fry will never run out. Reruns wouldn't work, I guess, and audiences are expected to ignore the logistics of Fry having already seen every other TV show released in the past 1000 years.

Okay, so maybe I'm turning into the guy in The Simpsons who complained about Itchy playing different notes on the same bone while using Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone. But one of the things I liked about Futurama is that you could usually believe the danger the characters were in. But in this episode, Fry's life-threatening situation is clearly just an excuse to force the Planet Express crew into a campaign to revive All My Circuits, which has already been cancelled and revived several times. This comes with all the self-referential winks and nudges and hey-we're-talking-about-ourselves jokes you'd expect.

Reviewing comedies is tricky because so many of the best ones offer more than just laughs. The novels of P.G. Wodehouse are funny, but survive because of their masterful use of the English language. The movies of Buster Keaton are funny, but also display some of the most impressive stunts ever caught on film. W. S. Gilbert's lyrics are funny, but achieved immortality when paired with Arthur Sullivan's music. The season four Futurama episode "The Sting" (whose writer, Patric M. Verrone, also wrote "The Impossible Stream") is both hilarious and emotional. But in "The Impossible Stream," it feels like the plot evolved from the jokes, and not the other way around.

But if "The Impossible Stream" is middling Futurama, it's still undeniably Futurama. A lot of these revivals just feel different. When Hulu brought Animaniacs back, you could tell that it wasn't quite the same show. I didn't feel that way here; even the flaws feel like the sort an earlier season might have made during one of its weaker episodes. Deciding to watch every TV show ever made just to develop a sense of purpose feels exactly like something Fry would do. There is some shock humour, but the episode never forgets that these characters, however mean they can get at times, do genuinely care for one another. And, even if the plot itself leaves me cold, there are a few genuine laughs throughout.

This episode didn't wow me, but it calmed me. At its best, Futurama has always been everything you could ask for: funny, emotional, and even thought-provoking. When it was average, it was pretty much like this. It didn't start on a high note, but I'm hopeful that it may reach one.