1ACV02: The Series Has Landed First UK airing: Sky One, 8:00pm, 28-9-99 "She's the one who programmed me for evil!" How do you follow up a great pilot episode? Easy -- you do more of the same, but better. Actually, there's nothing easy about it. Ever tried to write a sitcom script? I have. Probably lots of people have -- it's the whole concept of seeing something and thinking "I could do better than that." For many sitcoms it's probably true, unfortunately, but for good sitcoms it's actually quite staggeringly difficult. You have roughly 22 pages. You need at least five guaranteed laughs per page, preferably more. And you can't resort to writing nothing but fart jokes, not even on South Park. Now try writing a sitcom script. And another, and another, and another... Creators of successful sitcoms are often asked to produce others, in the hope that they'll catch lightning in a bottle for a second time. Sometimes they succeed; viz Frasier. More often they fail miserably; viz Veronica's Closet. Futurama falls comfortably into the former bracket. The main characters got their introductions in the first episode, as they should; now, the supporting cast get to take a bow. As well as Dr Zoidberg, Hermes and a second, better intro for the Professor, this show also brought in my favourite character, Amy Wong. Why Amy? Well, it's all down to my tragic 'kawaii anime chick' fetish. No Groening creation will ever look like any animated character from Japan in a thousand years, but the moment Amy started ranting away to herself in her deliberately untranslatable Eastern dialect, I knew I was going to like her. This episode also helps establish the year 3000. 1ACV01 showed that the future was all Thirties-style sci-fi glitz with a bureaucratic undercurrent, but 'The Series Has Landed' made it clear that the 31st century isn't that different to what we know today. The technology may be better, but none of it works right, and people -- whether they be humans, aliens or robots -- are just as stupid, lazy and greedy as ever. The corporate banality of Luna Park ("Address all complaints to the Monsanto corporation!") was the kind of satire normally reserved for the likes of Michael Moore or the best of The Simpsons, and to be honest is about as scathing as modern mainstream TV is likely to get. Just as the original Star Trek commented on society by hiding the message inside a science fiction wrapping, so Futurama ridicules the idiocies of our packaged, pre-spun, company-dominated, dissent-free Western world, from behind the seemingly harmless shield of cartoons. Television is the world's dominant media. Because of this, television needs shows that attack, criticise and generally ridicule the status quo. Unfortunately, the same bodies that make television shows generally represent the status quo. You don't find many prime-time TV shows that attack the very people in charge of the networks feeding the public shows like 'World's Scariest ATM Malfunctions'. Unless they happen to be animated, in which case anything goes. Someday, the suits may wake up to the fact that animated shows are the only way in which 'subversive' ideas are being broadcast in the mass media. Let's hope that day is a long, long way off. Woah. Almost got serious there for a moment. Back in the unreal world, 1ACV02 was a fine follow-up to the pilot. The jokes all worked, the characters all got nice moments, and there was even time for a moment of visual poetry as Fry and Leela appreciated the beauty of Earth. Plus there was the Crushinator, too. And the space alligators. They even anticipated spaceflight freaks like me moaning about the fact that the ascent stage of the LEM wouldn't have been there. That means the writers of Futurama care more about scientific accuracy than the writers of Voyager. There has to be a moral there somewhere. Rating: