“Futurama”8:30 p.m. Sunday on WNYW/Ch. 5
WE have seen the “Futurama” and it is a “Simpsons” for a new millennium.
Not the next millennium, but the one after that, a neo-post-postapocalyptic era in which men will be men acting like boys, robots will be robots and women will still be smart and resourceful and brave and forced to save mens’ butts on a regular basis.
At its heart the long-awaited animated series from “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening and former “Simpsons” producer David X. Cohen is a futuristic blend of “The Fugitive” Meets “Water Boy.”
Fry (successful voice actor Billy West) is a 25-year-old screwup who has nowhere to go but down until he literally stumbles into the year 3000 as the result of bumbling a simple pizza delivery to a cryogenics lab.
The new New York is a colorful world in which taking a pneumatic trip crosstown is easy but finding a non-violent cop is not.
Getting a job is easy. Getting out of it is not.
“You gotta do what you gotta do,” says the big brotherish system, which takes one whiff of Fly and decrees him – you guessed it – a delivery boy.
However, when his one-eyed, top-heavy Fate Assignment Officer, Lela (Katey Sagal), tries to implant his employment chip, he escapes.
Thus begins an adventure in which he will be joined by a dipso-kleptomaniacal robot named Bender (John DiMaggio), and Leela, who, being an orphaned alien, can relate to the box Fry is in, if not his inability to get out of it.
“I don’t want people thinking we’re robosexuals,” says Bender, who sounds like a grouchy Garry Marshall, “so if anyone asks, you’re my debugger.”
They hide out in ruins under what used to 30 Rock (a sign that the NBC-Fox feud continues) and then a bizarro museum of the mind, where the talking heads of great personalities of the past are preserved.
There’s Dennis Rodman, Leonard Nimoy, Richard Nixon. And, oh, yes, Matt Groening, who apparently is going to return to the shaggy hair and beard before he cashes in for the last time.
Look closely and you’ll see a misspelled “Barbara” Streisand on the shelf.
It’s pure “Simpsons” – from the bug-eyed, buck-toothed animation style and juvenile grins lurking everywhere – grafted onto the sort of excellent adventure Beavis and Butt-head might have in the year of the Jetsons.
Or, perhaps, we’re supposed to see this bizarro trio as a fluke Flywalker, his ponytailed Princess Leela and rusty robo-sidekick.
Whatever.
Their search for laughs on other planets is entertaining enough, but Dick Clark hosting “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” was old news years ago.
So it remains to be seen whether Groening and Cohen have hit a TV home run or just another Homer.
