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David X. Cohen Talks About Futurama's New Season
joelkeller writes "I spoke to David X. Cohen, executive producer of Futurama, about the upcoming season, which premieres on June 24 on Comedy Central. He talks about the season finale (!) and how the show is always on the precipice of cancellation."
The last time the Simpsons was funny was in.. oh 1999?
The Simpsons has a broad appeal to the typical soccer mom family. Futurama is a nerdy show which was a Leela/Fry romance about as awkward as The Big Bang Theory with a lobster from outer space. Futurama has to hit home runs with their target demographic because it's small, the Simpsons haven't done that in years. They keep being sufficiently successful because they don't age, every year there's a new year's worth of children identifying themselves with Bart and Lisa. Live actors won't be the same, for example right now we have the Harry Potter generation, people that grew up alongside the actors but the next generation will find someting else. They might still watch the Simpsons though.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
a Leela/Fry romance about as awkward as The Big Bang Theory
I'd say the exact opposite there. The big bang theory has romances that are awkward because they don't fit. There's no reason for the people dating in that show to be dating. There's no chemistry, and the writers just never seem to know what to do with them together. Fry/Leela are great because the characters are well written. Each has issues of abandonment and isolation within the greater society at large which act as a common bond.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Sure, there are plenty of shows that deserved to die. You don't generally hear much about them because they deserved to die. Nobody invests time and effort begging to have them back, and for the most part they are so forgettable that you never hear about them again.
The reason that most canceled shows that you do hear about are spoken of as being canceled unfairly is simply a selection bias. To throw out one that I do remember - SeaQuest. I think it was a good premise, but by the third season it had gone so far from what they had originally intended that they lost off of their fans, but never managed to attract their new target audience. No amount of scheduling games would have made up for the sheer badness of some of the episodes. Scheduling games didn't help the continuity when a character was mourned, got killed off and then was alive and well, never to be seen again. Still, the show wasn't all that dependent on the continuity, so the executives who rearranged the episodes didn't have a huge negative effect.
OTOH, for Firefly they refused to show the damned pilot at any point in the original broadcast run. If "Lost" had been treated as badly as Firefly, it never would have made any money either.
Yes. First, "Slashdot" isn't an entity which expresses opinions of the type you describe, different groups of individual slashdot posters express such opinions, and the opinions you describe have been expressed on slashdot regarding a handful of programs that have been cancelled over a period of very many years, out of the dozens of series that are cancelled each year.
Showing episodes out-of-order, when they are written with a broad story arc, clearly interferes with developing an audience(the Firefly issue), as does not showing a show consistently at all (the Futurama issue, which wasn't about timeslot so much as about following NFL football and thus frequently being either cancelled entirely or joined "in progress".)
The Futurama scheduling decision is clearly the kind of thing a network does because it doesn't think a show has that much value to start with -- it is treating the show as disposable filler and isn't even pretending to try to market it effectively. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that that kind of behavior interfered with the show reaching an audience that it otherwise would have. In fact, the DVD sales which evidenced that there was such an audience that the original broadcast schedule had failed to reach is the reason the show was renewed after the first time it was cancelled, and the fact that it has remained on the air since (whether in danger of being cancelled each season or not) pretty clearly indicates that even Fox thinks that the show is viable, despite it not having appeared to be under the initial treatment Fox gave it.
I agree the second was better than the first, though I also thought the double take by the guys *after* Amy's reaction was even better ("Oh wait, will you guys be there too? Ummm maybe not!").
I love Futurama, but not just for the intellectual side. How many comedy cartoons have had really good tear-jerker moments? Fry's dog, the story of his five-leaf clover, Leela's parents, etc. That's a damned rare thing for me, and like most guys pretty hard to admit, but Futurama's been able to pull it off more than a couple times.
You, and whoever modded me troll, seem to misunderstand me. I'm in no way saying that Futurama will never be good again.
What I'm saying is that it died a good death. Perhaps it died far too early, but it had the best death imaginable.
I know that we all are left wanting more, but it ended at exactly the right time.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised.
Yeah, I really don't get this. With the relative sophistication of fios set-top boxes, you'd think they'd gather every channel change, data link is taken care of, and Verizon would be frothing at the mouth to sell some of this data, no?
Not sure why the world is still relying on Nielsen ratings in this day and age.
When I launched, I checked it out. I was a Simpson's fan at the time so made sense. I was amazed at how good it was. Very rare to have a show that polished out of the gate. If you watch the first season of most animated shows you'll discover that it takes awhile for the voices to get in their groove, for the animation style to solidify and so on. Not Futurama, it was dynamite out of the gate.
However, I found it very hard to keep up on. The fucking thing was never on when it was supposed to be. I'd try and tune in and it wouldn't be on the air. Then they seemed to start shuffling it around. They'd move it to a time slot, I'd learn that, and it'd vanish and move.
I finally gave up.
I suppose it makes less difference now what with DVRs but pre DVR and pro digital cable, it took some effort to track down a show that got moved all the time, and it was real annoying to be on the correct channel at the correct time according to the guide and not see what you want.
Seinfeld was given an starting order of only four episodes in order to hold Jerry under contract so he couldn't start a competitor to The Tonight Show and still be in the running for the job that eventually went to Jay Leno. NBC was going to burn them off... then they hit it big and the rest is history.
No soul? Nothing to say about the people? Okay, it doesn't force the sentimentality down your throat like some shows (and that's a good thing IMO), but there are many moving moments - the four leaf clover episode gets me no matter how many times I watch it with subtle overtones of sibling rivalry overruled by brotherly love spread over a thousand years, and with comedic intervention throughout to stop it becoming too cloying. It's an incredibly clever piece of television because of the human insight.
Futurama never had a soul. -Which is a shame, because it could have done. It offers a huge and fun world to explore, but it never gets serious for even a second
Are you fucking *kidding* me? Have you never watched "Jurassic Bark", "Luck of the Fryfish", or "The Sting"? The Simpsons had some brilliant, emotional moments in it's golden years, but Futurama is easily its equal.