5 out of 5

Created by: Howard Overman, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir

covers season 1

Executive produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg!..  …is maybe something that gets people excited, but not me.  I have a lengthy history of ‘meh’ with the Apatow crowd – there are definitely some hits but about 1,000 more misses – and tend to find the type of ‘mature’ humor it supports infantile.  Not in its content, exactly, as I’m game for gross-out humor, but in the way it tries to mine for meaning in often really shallow bullshit.

So: I’m glad I wasn’t aware of Rogen and Goldberg’s involvement with Future Man prior to viewing, because I maybe would have skipped it, which would have meant missing out on one of the most bingeable and worth-every-episode shows I’ve seen in some time.  And although I’d like to credit co-creator Howard Overman (Misfits, Crazyhead) with that, it’s not like he has a perfect record (…Atlantis) and furthermore, if I’m being honest, the tone of the show rings much more true to our Apatow graduates than Overman.  Heck, they wrote a few episodes as well.  We’ll file this as a ‘hit’ then.

Future Man concerns Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson), still-lives-at-home janitor who wiles away his evenings under the handle of ‘Future Man’ on video game Biotic Wars.  The character of Josh, slightly tweaked, would be played as pathetic, but everyone is on board here to allow the role to just exist: this is a normal dude, and likely not so far off from you or your friends.  And most of us understand the distracting dedication to just beating that final level… which Josh finally does, celebrating to an audience of none.  …And then finds out that Biotic Wars was actually a recruiting tool, sent from the the future, to find the world’s greatest warrior, and hope for saving said future from evils to come.  ‘Wolf’ (Derek Wilson) and ‘Tiger’ (Eliza Coupe) deliver this all with straight-faced gusto, having just ported into Josh’s room, before Futturman pauses and realizes: that’s the plot from Last Starfighter.

Your brain was already screaming this, and if you’re like me, this is then where Future Man the show starts to win you over.  Because what’s great about these self-aware references is that they’re not done lazily, but rather – within context – logically, and form an amusing sigh of acceptance that has Josh constantly at odds with his future mates antics, recognizing the been-there-done-that nature to the tropes, but also understanding that it’s sort of what has to be done.  Y’know, to travel back into the past and get Back to the Futured; to pull a Terminator; and etcetera.  Fear not, though, this isn’t just a litany of film nods, as Future Man builds up its own fascinating mythology regarding Wolf’s and Tiger’s street-dwelling rebels and the maybe ‘normal’ Biotics, and the sterile world from which they come.  Nor does the show pull the fish out of water gag too often, instead using its growing repository of yuks to build up its own set of references; part of the show’s great joy as it continues is its consistency: we’re not laughing at the bombastic behaviors and then the concept is dropped – everything is rolled into the next scene, and the next episode, and the next gag, hence the bingeing fun.

And wouldn’t ya’ know, along the way the story and characters become grabbing as well, which makes the payoffs delivered in the resolution especially impressive: everyone gets a fair shake, even while juggling a whole bunch of time travel nonsense.

Wrapping back around to the Apatowness of it, that does suggest that there’s a requisite amount of bodily fluids expunged for humor’s sake, but even here I was impressed by the – we’ll call it – restraint on display.  This stuff works in the same fashion as the referential stuff and the layered humor: we don’t revel in the semen and vomit and etcetera.  It’s flung at us, the characters remember the flinging, and we move on.  I turned away a couple of times, but I was laughing pretty much the whole time as well.

For every eye-rolling “I called that” moment of Future Man, there’s a matching moment that will completely catch you off guard with the way it cleverly manipulates its familiarity into something fresh.  The show could easily have roiled in excess and winks, but the actors and writers and directors all synced up to find exactly the right tone, inclusive enough for dorks, nerds, cool kids, kids who have never played video games, people who think Apatow penis props are the bees knees, infinity and beyond…