Futurama’s new season struggles to make NFTs and AI humorous

It solely takes a couple of minutes earlier than Futurama’s new season begins explaining non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, an idea most individuals in all probability haven’t considered for greater than a yr.

Regardless of being set within the far future, Futurama has at all times been comfy commenting on trendy life. There have been episodes about smartphones and 3D printers that use sci-fi nonsense to complicate the ideas in a approach that makes them humorous. That has largely continued to be true over a few years (and cancellations). However in its Hulu revival final yr, the present actually began to mess up the stability, and its topical jokes started to overshadow the sci-fi gags. The upcoming 12th season struggles much more to discover a Futurama-style twist on absurd ripped-from-the-headlines storylines about NFTs and AI. It makes for an uneven season that usually feels prefer it’s lacking what initially made the present so particular.

The NFTs are essentially the most egregious instance, they usually additionally occur to be featured closely within the debut episode, which makes for a horrible first impression. The convoluted plot includes Bender promoting a CryptoPunks-style assortment to make a fast buck, which in some way leads him on a quest to find his origins in Mexico. In the meantime, the remainder of the Planet Specific crew makes an attempt a heist to liberate Bender’s NFT assortment from an artwork museum, solely to be thwarted by the complexities of the blockchain and digital ledgers.

The issue is that these aren’t some type of quirky Futurama tackle NFTs — they’re simply common NFTs as we all know them now, horrible artwork related to a digital receipt. The episode spends an annoyingly massive a part of its runtime explaining the idea — which, to be honest, is hard to do succinctly — with out providing a lot by the way in which of jokes or commentary. It simply assumes NFTs in and of themselves are sufficient to make folks snort.

Greater than a decade in the past, after we all thought Futurama was actually over for good, executive producer and head writer David X. Cohen explained to me how the present was in a position to efficiently translate trendy issues into its retrofuturistic world. “We at all times prefer it when the actual world provides us concepts for episodes,” he stated. “Setting the present 1,000 years sooner or later doesn’t imply you’re not going to touch upon society as we speak, it simply makes it one step eliminated.” Because the NFT episode proves, it’s that “one step eliminated” half that’s so necessary. With out it, the episode is a bunch of lifeless jokes which are additionally painfully dated.

I’ve seen the primary six episodes of the season (there will probably be 10 in complete), and issues fare barely higher in a while. There’s a Squid Recreation spoof that explores Fry’s childhood by means of some form of weird time journey and a fast-fashion episode that turns Cara Delevingne into Frankenstein’s monster and the professor into a mode icon. I wouldn’t say these are examples of Futurama at its finest — the jokes are hit and miss, and most are missing the guts that retains the present grounded. However they a minimum of perceive Futurama’s unique premise: utilizing this weirdo future as a lens to magnify trendy points.

That is much less true in essentially the most unoriginal episode of the bunch, when the present turns an AI chatbot into Leela’s jealous good friend. It’s nearly each AI film trope rolled into 20 minutes of animation. It’s additionally fairly bizarre to deal with AI as a brand new factor in any respect given Futurama is swarming with sentient robots.

Perhaps there’s extra coronary heart and wit within the later episodes, as Hulu does promise the season will discover “the subsequent chapter in Fry and Leela’s fateful, time-twisted romance.” However from what I’ve seen, the stability is simply too far askew. There’s an excessive amount of give attention to being topical and never sufficient on the oddball humor, long-running characters, and heat that has made all of it work so nicely earlier than. Like the remainder of the world, Futurama ought to’ve left NFTs prior to now.

Futurama season 12 begins streaming on Hulu on July twenty ninth.