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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.
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.