“Good news, everyone!” – Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth

The year 3000 in Futurama is Louis C.K.’s famous “Everything is great and nobody is happy” statement taken to its illogical, animated conclusion. Fry, the Professor, Lela, Zoidberg, Bender, Hermes, Amy, and a host of other ancillary characters (like poor Zap and Kif, picture) take the logic of Star Trek, combine it with a Flash Gordon-esque retro-future, a plethora of transhumanist tech (heads in jars, cryonics, nano, cloning, ad nauseam) and a huge grain of nuttiness, and you have what might be one of the best shows to ever be on television.

Futurama does Star Trek one better, however, in the category of making you forget anyone is different. The shows  have rough analogues: Professor:: Picard (bald leader); Zoidbert::Worf (alien); Bender::Data (robot); Fry::Wesley (child); Lela::Troy (pseud0-alien). Listen, I get it, the analogies aren’t perfect, you see the similarities. But while Star Trek hammers us constantly with the “Worf is a Klingon and therefore quite different from normal humans” and “Data is an android and therefore perplexed by things like laughter and figurative language” routine, Futurama goes in the opposite direction. All of the characters, human or otherwise, are so bizarre and ludicrous that we simply see their quirks as a virtue of who they are, not what they are. Bender is filled with vice, Zoidberg is a freak, and the Professor is a madman not because robots are amoral, aliens weird, or humans crazy, but because that’s just how those characters are.

In short, Futurama is the best example of, uh, entity-type-blindness; personhood, the value of the mind and person, is central to allowing the weirdness of the show to shine through. Can’t wait for the new episodes at the end of the month.

Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis, follows Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter S. Thompson for the 22nd Century. After five years living in paranoid isolation on a mountain, Spider’s book contracts are due. To write, he needs his fingers around the seedy, black, artificial heart of the city so that he can squeeze the tar and plaque from its arteries onto the blank pages in front of him. Spider’s column is “I Hate It Here” and its popularity is directly related to Spider’s level of misanthropy. He’s the only writer angry enough to seek the truth and insane enough to print it. His bodyguard, Channon, and his assistant, Yelena, both as debauched and deranged as their surly boss, help Spider get into trouble and right back out of it. The show, like the comic, would follow Spider’s return to the city, starting out in a disgusting apartment in the worst part of town writing about the filth and decay around him. In the comic, Spider is promoted to a new apartment as his popularity grows. The formula for the show is built right in: at the beginning of each season, Spider moves into a new apartment. In step with his rise through society, Spider’s gaze moves from the filth and corruption in the gutters of the City up to the filth and corruption of the city’s and country’s highest offices.

Cyborgs, hybrids, uploaded nano-clouds, bowel disruptors, neuro-implants, cryonics, A.I., vat-grown meat, and a smorgasbord of transhumanist tech bursts from the background in every panel of the comic and sits at the heart of every story line. The show would be no different. Transmet would be an anthropological window into the City, a thriving transhuman society, the same way The Wire and Treme artfully let us into the soul of Baltimore and New Orleans.

Personhood is everywhere. Netflix recently added Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends to their “instant play” repertoire, which means I may or may not have spent several hours watching a cartoon from the early sixties as part of my Saturday routine. As usual, there was a little bit of transhumanist propaganda hidden within it.

In the first episode of the series, where everyone is introduced, we first meet Mr. Peabody doing yoga in his penthouse in New York City. Glancing at the Way-Back-Machine, Peabody notes, “ah, that’s Sherman’s. Sherman is my boy.” Peabody recounts how he acquired Sherman, spoofing the story of how a person gets their first dog: he looked and looked at strays in the pound, but some sad mutt on the street, Sherman, won his heart. Peabody rescues Sherman from bullies and, upon trying to return him to the orphanage, is saddened by the condition of Sherman’s life.

What makes this so interesting is that the cartoon acknowledges that Peabody is a dog and that dogs can’t adopt a boy. That Peabody can graduate Harvard, work on the stock market, or enlist in the foreign service, or develop projects for the government (key points in his auto-bio) aren’t big deals, but when he wants to start a family of his own, suddenly that’s a legal matter. Peabody goes through the adoption process and gets references from old friends (the sitting president), but a trial still occurs.

The prosecution’s case: “This dog isn’t a fit person to raise the boy, in fact, he isn’t a person at all!” Ah, yes, the dehumanization defense. Sad.

Peabody, acting as his own lawyer (of course) retorts: “Thank you, I consider that an excellent recommendation.” (Yes, Mr. Peabody is in fact using reverse discourse to turn the prosecution’s insult into a point in his favor.)

The court decides, “We see no reason that if a boy can have a dog, a dog can’t have a boy.”

Sometimes it takes a cartoon to cut through the the legalese and make a point so obvious. Children accept the evidence in front of them: Mr. Peabody is smart, good, and responsible; Sherman lives in an orphanage with a terrible head master; Mr. Peabody would like to adopt Sherman, everybody wins. In this rare case, the courts actually make the right decision for the right reasons and the brilliant Peabody takes Sherman home.

Now think about the scenario this way: Mr. Peabody, a successful, intelligent committed-bachelor with no interest in women, living in New York City, who wears a bow-tie and has an aloof speech affectation, decides he would like to adopt a child, but is told by the courts he cannot because he isn’t fit. Is anyone seeing any parallels, here? I often wonder if shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle accidentally placed the seeds of social liberalizing. It sounds like a plot Glenn Beck would dream up: “Now, I’m not saying this is true, but isn’t it interesting how Rocky and Bullwinkle are both men, but the two Soviet spies, Boris Badinov and Natasha, are a couple? And why doesn’t Mr. Peabody have a wife? Is this cartoon, this show for children, saying America is a land of homosexuality and pedophilia, while communist Russia is the country with the proper values? These are just questions, people, but why am I the only one asking them?” Beck would then attempt to derive some hidden message from the various animals portrayed on the show using his magic blackboard of insanity.

The point, if there is one here, is that a cartoon in the sixties figured out that adoption is a matter of taking a child in a bad or sad position and putting that child into a home with a parent or parents who will love and care for him or her. That’s it. Why we haven’t figured that out yet in 2010 I don’t know.

Star Wars: The Live-Action Series. Who knows when we’ll actually see this? Plus, of course, George Lucas’ previous attempts at doing live-action Star Wars TV actually made The Phantom Menace look like Citizen Kane. Still, we can’t help being excited by the idea of this show — maybe it’s the fact that it’s supposed to be more noir, focussing on the underbelly of bounty hunters and smugglers after the rise of the Empire. Any show that features a big role for Boba Fett can’t be all bad. Not to mention, we hope Lucas finds a way to include Jedi-gone-rogue Quinlan Vos. Plus there are all those whispers that Lucas was recruiting some of Britain’s best drama writers to pitch in. So let’s hope it happens.

Lucas is a terrible director and a worse writer, but he is an awesome producer and special effects visionary. If he can be the bigger man, step back, and let someone else craft and dialogue his universe while he still gets to invent and explore, it’ll be the best thing on TV in ages (the SW expanded universe is unbelievably enormous). If Lucas demands he writes and directs, I hope TV execs have the balls to tell him, “Thanks, but no.”

Also exciting: A Game of Thrones, Riverworld, and Being Human.

Oh man. Just set up netflix account. Star Trek: TNG and Battlestar Galactica in the que. Make it so.

In keeping with the theme of talking about my favorite TV shows under the pretense of some sort of analysis, I’d like to talk a little bit about Fringe. For starters, Fringe does three very important things.

1. It gives us a genuinely mad, morally gray scientist who works for the good guys. Who doesn’t love Walter Bishop?
2. Three very strong female characters: FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, FBI Agent Astrid Farnsworth, and CEO of Massive Dynamic, Nina Sharp.
3. A completely human and yet totally Other menace.

If I’m feeling cheeky I may write a post on each of those points (especially #2) sometime this week, but for now I just want to point out those are traits of the show rarely seen on TV. And though I’d love to talk about how much I love the gross-out factor of the show, (giant parasitic worms? sign me up!) what I’m more interested in the moment is Fringe and its portrayal of technology as neutral.

Like its cousin Lost, Fringe is a mythology show, with a long, extended plot arc that requires and rewards viewer loyalty and neurotic attention to detail. Unlike Lost, Fringe has mastered the “monster” episode that made the original X-Files so popular. A “monster” episode is one in which the larger mythology of the show is secondary to the investigation of something weird, like a feral child or a chimera. They have a jump-right-in feel and are less subtle. Monster episodes in Fringe are some of the most enjoyable and, curiously, some of the most ripe for analysis because of the formula used by the shows writers.

Invariably, whatever horrific thing the team from Fringe Division is investigating, Walter Bishop and William Bell, the two super-scientists from Fringe’s fictive universe*, had a hand in inventing it. At some point Walter remembers what he was trying to do when he concocted said malicious thing, reverse engineers his own invention and solves the case. The fantastic part about this goofy formula is that it shows the technology to be invented by a man we trust and like yet are unsure of, Walter Bishop, is then misused by evil people, and then better understood and countered by that same inventor. In short, the technology is always a pawn. There is never a moment where the inventor is taken over by his inventions (a la Doc Ock) or is his invention shown to be inherently evil.

For example, one of my favorite episodes involves Walter’s elaborate scheme to hide the components to a teleportation device and the criminals usage of a matter-wave disruptor thingamajig that allows them to walk through solid matter. What makes it brilliant is that neither technology comes off as evil, or even bad. The episode makes a point to highlight the very good intentions Walter had with his initial invention. Furthermore, we see that technology did not merely “fall” into the wrong hands, but was stolen by manipulative double agents. Abrams, despite his tendency to camp things up a bit too much, always knows how to seek the human element in a situation.

We accept cursory explanations of how a person can transform into a beast or how a computer screen can liquefy someone’s brain because the story isn’t riding on the reality of those events, but on how people work together to cause evil and do good. Every case on the show has been solved by a full team effort. Every character has their weaknesses, but as a team (which at its largest was six people including Charlie and Broyles) their strengths are able to shine and save the day. It’s schmaltzy when I spell it out like that, but what makes Fringe entertaining is that the dynamic between the weaknesses and strengths is different every week.

In addition to the presentation of technology as a neutral thing in non-neutral hands, Fringe does a decent job of showing medicine and drugs as neutral as well. Though initially used for humorous purposes, Walter’s seemingly wanton usage of hallucinogens and narcotics is shown to stem not from hedonistic drives (though those are sated) but from intellectual curiosity and self-control. At least twice, we see Walter’s use of LSD to allow Olivia to confront her own mental situation. Yet in another episode, we see Walter suffering due to a minor overdose of Valium. The usage of drugs by an exquisite mind for both enjoyment and betterment is a rare portrayal in popular entertainment indeed.

It is very easy for a show like Fringe to take the Michael Crichton approach where science goes crazy, escaping its inventor’s control. Instead Fringe shows a consciousness is necessary to guide a technology to good or to evil. Walter and Bell invent a technology, evil people misuse it in their absence, Walter reasserts ownership of the tech through his intellect and regains control. It’s nice to see a show about new technologies and cutting edge science that focuses more on the people and their reasons for acting than just the tech itself.

I also enjoy watching Olivia shoot people and Walter eating Twizzlers while he is doing an autopsy. Also Broyles and Nina Sharp are both terrifying and weird. Did I mention there was a snake-bat-lion-scorpion? The show is good. You should probably watch it.

*It is worth noting that J.J. Abrahms uses science fiction tropes (time travel, parallel universes) to actually explain his fictive universe. In Star Trek, time travel explains his reinvisioning of things. In Fringe, parallel universes explain why Walter Bishop, William Bell, and Massive Dynamic exist yet the rest of history so closely matches our own.