Does Futurama Have a Future?

Maybe is the best the folks at Newsarama, a pop culture site with a particular focus on comics, could get out of co-creator David X. Cohen.

I'm a big fan of Futurama, made by the same folks who made The Simpsons. I'm not really surprised that Futurama didn't take off the way the simpler and more accessible Simpsons did, but I am surprised that it has languished as a cult favorite while inferior pieces of crap like Family Guy get renewed and become big hits.

(Ok, I can't resist a minor rant about Family Guy. I know a number of people who claim to enjoy it, but have little to say about Futurama or the clever, raucous Venture Brothers adventure/comedy cartoon. This is mystifying. Family Guy is a blatant cheap knock off of The Simpsons, and has nothing new or interesting to say. The characters are uniformly unlikable, and the gimmick of using pop culture references to segue off into a non-sequiter flashback is incredibly lazy. The central character, Peter Griffin, is a lazy, dumb, fat slob like Homer Simpson, but where Homer is endearing no matter how appalling his misdeeds, Peter is just appalling, without even the slightest quality or character. He's merely cruel to everyone around him and stupid to a degree that makes it impossible to understand how his relatively agreeable but rather dim wife would put up with him for even a moment. And the other characters are rendered with mystifying inconsistency: why is the fairly ordinary daughter, Meg, loathed and dismissed by the other family members? Is the toddler, Stewie, a mad genius ala Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory, or merely a pissy aesthete? Can the other characters understand Stewie, or is it only the dog, Brian who understands him? It appears to be both or either, depending on whether it's convenient to the writers to allow Stewie to interact with other characters or whether they merely want to use him for sarcastic asides the other characters don't have to react to. And why does the dog talk, but no other animals do?

I'm not suggesting that an animated program of this type requires complete consistency. Futurama is full of little inconsistencies, and the Simpsons essentially resets every episode no matter what calamity occurs. But the characters in these programs are not merely cardboard cutouts for the writers to push up against each other; they have a consistency of characterization.)

Well, I came to praise Futurama and ended up burying Family Guy. But I hope the program is continued in some format. Or if not, I'll have four seasons on DVD, plus the four direct to DVD movies, and an ongoing comic book that is consistently fun.