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1ACV01: Space Pilot 3000
First UK airing: Sky One, 8:00pm, 21-9-99
"Welcome to the world of tomorrow!"
I read somewhere that Fox's executives were worried
about Futurama's prospects as a
series after seeing the pilot. Apparently they considered certain
elements -- namely the suicide booths and the fatalism of 'You
gotta do what you gotta do' -- to be depressing. If things like
that are enough to bring down the average overpaid TV executive,
it's probably a good job they very rarely leave their ivory towers.
The real world would send them screaming for the nearest suicide
booth.
'Space Pilot 3000' actually did a very good job of
introducing audiences to a quite complex situation. Most sitcoms
can be summed up in a simple sentence; "the lives and loves
of six attractive young New Yorkers", "a pompous radio
psychiatrist has to take care of his disabled dad", "America's
most dysfunctional cartoon family". With Futurama,
it's more a case of "a loser from 1999 accidentally gets
cryogenically frozen and wakes up 1000 years later and gets a
job working for his great-great-great-(etc) nephew's space delivery
service with a one-eyed alien chick and an alcoholic kleptomaniac
robot and..." It takes a little more setting up than Shasta
McNasty, put it that way.
The thing is, it works. Fry, Leela and Bender all
get their characters established quickly and efficiently, without
sacrificing what any sitcom needs to survive -- the jokes. The
nearest comparable pilot episode would be Red Dwarf's opener,
which spent so much time on the 'sit' that the 'com' suffered.
Things picked up, at least for a while, but it didn't really
get going until its second season. Futurama,
on the other hand, was running from the word go.
I was worried for a while that the show might go overboard
on the guest stars from the Head Museum, but if anything this
aspect of Y3K has actually been underplayed. Since they're just
heads in jars there's a limit to how much the guest stars can
do in an episode, and to be honest -- even as a Brit who's quite
well up on US pop culture -- I didn't even know who some of them
were, so they didn't overpower the storylines. Ron who?
What did surprise me was how much there was to find
on second (and later) viewings. Some of the jokes didn't register
until the second or even third time around (Leela's Fate Assignment
Officer identity number, for one), and while Fry at first just
seemed like a jerk, subsequent viewings actually made his "I
give up" speech in the undercity quite poignant, and Leela's
response even more so. Similarly, I thought that Bender was just
going to be a robot Homer Simpson, but when you look at him again,
even in his very first appearance, it's clear that he's capable
of being hilariously unpleasant in a way that Homer never could
-- and still get away with it.
So, the pilot episode was definitely a success. Personally,
I didn't have any problems at all with the so-called 'downbeat'
attitude that the execs objected to, but later episodes had obviously
been written under the Fox-enforced edict of 'nothing depressing'.
(I bet we never see the suicide booths again, for a start.) Fortunately,
this didn't in any way remove the show's teeth or detract from
the comedy. Futurama came, it saw,
and it kicked ass. All hail Futurama!
Rating: 
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