Years after Fox Broadcasting ignominiously pulled the plug on Futurama, the smartest, funniest sci-fi show of the new millennium is coming back on Comedy Central.
This time, Futurama is here to stay, head writer and executive producer David X. Cohen told Wired.com by telephones.
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Futurama Voice Actor on Fry’s Squeak, Hollywood Freaks“I should cross my fingers while saying this, but relations are at a high with all the studioses we’re working with right now,” he said before Thursday’s airing of the new season’s first two episodes. “The lesson? Give us a good time slot, and the audience will be there for us.” (Set your DVRs now: Futurama airs Thursdays at 10 p.m./9 p.m. Central on Comedy Central.)
After a period marked by Adult Swim reruns and straight-to-DVD Futurama films like The Beast With a Billion Backs, Cohen and creator Matt Groening’s animated series comes blazing back with the help of the same nerds, comedians, composers and writers that made the show great from the get-go.
The misadventures of Fry, Leela, Bender and the rest of the Planet Express crew remain as culturally sharp and freakishly prescient as in the show’s former life. Everything old is awesomely new again.
What can viewers expect when the revitalized show re-enters TV orbit? Cohen spills some of the beans on Futurama ‘s new season and holds forth on Battlestar Galactica ‘s lame finale, the strange ubiquity of Richard Nixon and other heady subjects in the wide-ranging interview below.
We have geek liftoff.
Wired.com: Futurama ‘s first new episode has some sticky birth imagery. What do you think of the series’ deaths and rebirths?
David X. Cohen: When we were on Fox the first time, we were bounced all the time and stuck in death slots. Nobody could ever find the show, including us. And it was frustrating. When it went into reruns on Adult Swim, it started to attract a respectable audience, once it was available in a predictable time and place.
Wired.com: Let’s discuss nagging details about the first two episodes premiering Thursday. Why do death spheres always have vulnerable holes?
Cohen: All death spheres have one vulnerable opening. There would be no excitement to owning a death sphere if it didn’t have a vulnerable opening.
Wired.com: Why does Richard Nixon continue to wield such influence, decades after his disgraceful exit?
Cohen: Dying in Futurama is a minor impediment. Richard Nixon is there more per hour than any other politician, because Matt Groening takes glee in the idea of resuscitating him. It used to be a one-time joke, but then we decided to have him re-elected early on.
Now he’s a regular on the show. Nixon was a real-life cartoon character. He had staked out his claim in toon territory.
Wired.com: Speaking of Nixon, how dirty and nasty can you get, now that you’re on Comedy Central? I spotted some envelope-pushing in the first two episodes.
Cohen: My general approach for the series as a whole is to keep the tone pretty close to what it was the first time. I don’t want anyone to think we’re taking radical turns. I don’t think there is an individual moment that would have been trouble in the original Fox days. But Comedy Central standards are certainly looser. But we are a stronger censor of our show than Fox or Comedy Central. You will not see full-frontal nudity. Perhaps PG-50 nudity.
Wired.com: What is off-limits, if anything?
Cohen: Usually language; that comes up. The dirtiest word in vogue lately is douche. But we decided to stay away from that for two reasons: It’s perhaps a step beyond the tone of the show, and we’d be the last guest to the douche party.
Wired.com: That’s old — I heard it in the schoolyard in the ’80s.
Cohen: Someone recently discovered that you could say it on TV, and censors wouldn’t stop it. It’s a common problem writing shows like ours. You’re always looking for a new word for jerk or dummy.
Wired.com: Fair enough. What is going to get righteously skewered in future episodes? Please say Auto-Tune and terrorism.
Cohen: Our third episode is going to be dealing with future incarnations of YouTube, Twitter and iphonesss in 3000. In our original run, we couldn’t do them, because they did not exist. Sitting on the sidelines of the world has generated new ideas for us.
Wired.com For the record, we were against that. What else?
Cohen: Craig Ferguson is going to be a talking part of Leela‘s anatomy. Our fourth episode is an episode in which Bender champions the cause of robosexual rights. He tries to get a ballot proposition called Proposition Infinity in support of robosexual marriage.
Wired.com: The robot Tea Partiers are going to hate that. Do you ever worry about being dated by your worthy satirical subjects?
Cohen: Usually, there are topics that inspire the show. But being sci-fi, we have the liberty of modifying them for the setting. It’s an animated show, so some topics are probably not going to be around by the time the show airs.
Wired.com: Why has sci-fi TV, animated and otherwise, continued to mostly suck after Futurama ‘s cancellation? And what are you going to do about it?
Cohen: The rule that we try to live by, what defines our best episodes, is that even though we try to do gripping sci-fi, we need to have a relatable human story. You need emotional interactions between the characters. People need to relate to it, get sucked into believing it. It’s not enough to have great computer graphics or visuals.
Wired.com: Devo, Al Gore, Patton Oswalt and other all-stars are showing up on Futurama this season. Anyone on your wish list that you haven’t worked with yet?
Cohen: Not really. The way we operate is to put the story in place and find interesting people to put into it. It would be nice to say that I’ve always wanted to work with Mick Jagger, but we’ve never constructed a story around that. We do have an episode coming up about Comic-Con in the year 3010, and for that we have Kateee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica . As a Galactica fan, I was excited about the possibility.
Wired.com: How did she fare in the voiceover department? Futurama voice actor Billy West is pretty serious about his craft.
Cohen: She took to it very impressively. She plays a human in the future who has a fetish for aliens. And she took to the role with gusto.
Wired.com: That’s nasty. What did you think of Battlestar Galactica ‘s underwhelming finale?
Cohen: I was pretty cool with it overall. Speaking from experience, endings are hard, because TV shows aren’t supposed to really end. It’s not like a movie, where everything is designed to end in a big final moment. I really loved the previous season’s finale, when they arrived at the smoking Earth.
Wired.com: What’s the relationship like with Comedy Central?
Cohen: They’re very hands-off. That’s the way Matt Groening operates. He likes the shows to stew in their own juices before he takes them to the studio. And the studioses have been completely minimalist, but also enthusiastic. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there, so I should reassure everybody that we have the same cast, composers and writers back. I think it’s going to be a smooth transition.
Wired.com: Finally, the hard science. How has your Harvard and Berkeley background in physics and computer science prepared your for the mind-numbing task that is assembling Futurama?
Cohen: I don’t often go to my old textbooks for advice in our stories. Although I do think we show a respect for science, we don’t live by the letter of its law. But I would say that working really hard has come in handy. I’d also like to compliment our other writers — Ken Keeler, Jeff Westbrook and Bill Odenkirk — who respectively have Ph.D.s in applied mathematics, computer science and inorganic chemistry. I only have a master’s in computer science. Our science is often not accurate, but we know when it’s wrong.
