Futurama scores 49 — Live Historic

Futurama

A joke shop with a real crew. Bender is intemperance. The friendship is not a joke.

Would you still put it on?

A delivery crew at the end of time, joking, and somehow still loyal.

The eight

Industry

6/10

They have a dumb job and they keep showing up to it.

Household

6/10

Not a family by blood. A crew that behaves like one when it counts.

Piety

3/10

The sacred is usually a setup. Now and then the show means it anyway.

Courage

5/10

They do the stupid brave thing for each other.

Republic

5/10

Institutions are mocked, often fairly, sometimes cheaply.

Temperance

4/10

The robot is a sermon on appetite. The show likes him too much.

Truth

5/10

Feelings are told slant, but the best episodes do not lie.

Stewardship

5/10

Friendship is what survives the year 3000. That is a kind of posterity.

What it really is

Fry falls a thousand years forward and lands a delivery job with people who will, against the entire premise of the century, care if he lives. The show is a comedy and a lot of the comedy is Bender doing whichever vice is handiest. Do not take your temperance from the robot.

Take the crew. A ridiculous job, kept. A friend, retrieved from the edge of the universe because you said you would. There are worse teachers on this list with better production design. It will not make you solemn. On its best nights it will make you less willing to abandon people. That is enough to keep it in the house, with the understanding that the beer-bot is not your pastor.

Live historically

Call the friend you keep meaning to call. Talk longer than the joke.

From the desk of Living Historic.

Founders Notes

Living historically

This is not a settled myth about better people. It is a way of standing in their weather. People understand a thing by fitting it into a story that is still going, so the desk puts you in the middle of it: ordinary lives, the pressure on them, the choice they actually had.

The present is continuous with the past. Crowds, mass moods, a town thinning out, a politics that talks to everyone at once: these are not only chapters. They are forces you can still feel. History here is not a morality play about the dead. It is a way of seeing what is still operating.

You are a link, not the chain. A life runs seventy or eighty years. In that span you are a steward. You inherited a language, a house, a standard. You do not own them. You keep them long enough to hand them on.

The house that keeps this desk landed in Boston in 1630, a hundred and fifty years before the country had this name. They did not arrive into a finished story. They arrived into weather, work, and a place that had to be kept for people they would never meet.

Futurama is marked Watch awake. A high mark is a story you can hand on. A low mark spends the link on itself.

The eight

Industry
6/10
They have a dumb job and they keep showing up to it.
Household
6/10
Not a family by blood. A crew that behaves like one when it counts.
Piety
3/10
The sacred is usually a setup. Now and then the show means it anyway.
Courage
5/10
They do the stupid brave thing for each other.
Republic
5/10
Institutions are mocked, often fairly, sometimes cheaply.
Temperance
4/10
The robot is a sermon on appetite. The show likes him too much.
Truth
5/10
Feelings are told slant, but the best episodes do not lie.
Stewardship
5/10
Friendship is what survives the year 3000. That is a kind of posterity.

Futurama

The eight

Also on the desk