Future Man (2017-2020)

About a year ago I wrote my first review for a show – “Love, Death, Robots” (2019) – wherein I claimed it would be a rare event for me to review shows, as I was running a movie review website.
Well, joke’s on me, as this is the third show I’m reviewing. That’s not the direction I want my site to go, but I realized I can’t run a review website if I don’t also talk about all of the outstanding television available too.
And that’s where “Future Man” (2017-2020) comes in.

Witless loser Josh Futterman (Josh Hutcherson) led a boring life as a janitor at a pharmaceutical company. He lived with his parents, had no friends, and almost exclusively passed his time playing videogames, focusing on beating the unbeatable “Biotic Wars.”
When he did, two warriors from the future teleported back in time to recruit him for their war.
I leaned over to Megan and said “Hey, this is just like ‘The Last StarFighter’,” to which the show immediately repeated, with Josh telling the travelers “This is just like ‘The Last StarFighter!’”

And from there, it went full crazy.

Born from the mind of Seth Rogan and executively produced by Hutcherson, “Future Man” was three seasons of the most consistently comedic shenanigans I’ve ever seen.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good comedy shows out there, like “The Good Place” (2016-2020) or “Parks and Rec” (2009-2015), but they’re focused on telling a strong moral story with jokes thrown in, while “Future Man” told a story where the dialogue was built around the jokes. That sounds like it would be detrimental, but it wasn’t, it was written so damn well. I don’t think there was a single episode that didn’t make me laugh out loud. Even the end credits on the show finale were a treat.

Future soldiers Tiger (Eliza Coupe) and Wolf (Derek Wilson) were sent back from a horrible dystopian nightmare to fix the originator today, Terminator style. While we never got to see more than a few seconds of their future, they constantly talked about it, alternating between the bizarre locations they’d infiltrated – like evil volcano lairs and underground doomsday vaults – or naming the battle plans they used – like “The Porpoise’s Legs” or “The Butterfly’s Teeth,” – though never actually explaining what those plans were or what to do.

Because Josh had defeated “Biotic Wars,” Tiger and Wolf shanghaied him to join their team, noting that he was the savoir the future needed and that his prowess in the game proved he was everything they hoped for. Josh, however, pointed out that he was just really good with a controller and not actually any good with hand-to-hand fighting or weapon usage or anything else.
As their adventures got more ridiculous and their time-traveling antics became more destructive, Josh wanted nothing more than to desperately quit the team and go back to his boring life. He’d ‘quit,’ only to let himself get sucked back into the mission.
Wolf, a battle-hardened explosives expert, learned 5-star Michelin-chef style artisan cooking in one evening, a skill he then used in every place and era they passed through..
Tiger had the least amount of character development throughout, mostly focusing on being incredibly condescending to Josh while lamenting her failures as the commanding officer of her future battle team and how her mistake got everyone killed. Though, as all good time-travel tropes reveal, when Tiger got the chance to retry the mission to save her team, they all still died anyway.
Collectively, the team rarely succeeded. They constantly and consistently failed upwards, occasionally getting things right, often taking one step forwards and two steps back, fixing one issue while making many others worse, until those numerous bad things started to cancel each other out.

Just about every single sci-fi and time-travel trope you can think of was included here, making fun of “Back to the Future” (1985) and “Terminator” (1984) and “Avatar” (2009) and many, many more, with joyful abandon. Some of it was simply referencing the concept and media, other times it was a full on lampooning, pointing out why certain ideas were so stupid, or how easy it would be to botch one of them.

The show’s three seasons each focused on a different realm of time-traveling goofiness, and while I wish there was more of the show I could enjoy in the future, I’m glad it ended after three, because it meant the writing staff could streamline their ideas and condense as many jokes into the limited run as possible, without having to worry about a continued, unfortunate decline into unfunny repeats of the same jokes.

I do need to point out – and this is huge – this is not a family friendly show. If it was a movie, it’d be rated ‘R’.
There were multiple naked people (both genders, front and back) and lots of cursing. Like much of my favorite media, this is not for the faint of heart or those who like to clutch pearls. None of the jokes ever crossed the line into actual bad stuff (racism, misogyny, etc), but there are plenty of gross-out moments, uncomfortable sex jokes, and other icky things.
And more than once we saw someone’s head explode, though it wasn’t often.
It never got to HBO levels of nudity and gore, but it certainly wasn’t child-friendly either.

Nothing I write about this show will truly do it justice.
If you have a sense of humor and need a new show to binge during your COVID quarantine, this is the one.
Go to Hulu and watch it.