Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Future Man’, The Hulu Comedy Where a Janitor Tries to Save Humanity

One of the best things about the streaming revolution is that services allow producers to try some new forms. The sci-fi comedy has been around for many years, but not as much in series form, and not connected to video games. Hulu’s Future Man connects comedy, sci-fi and video games in a fun show from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. But is it funny?

A Guide to Our Rating System

Opening Shot: The opening of a pilot can set a mood for the entire show (think Six Feet Under); thus, we examine the first shot of each pilot.
The Gist: The “who, what, where, when, why?” of the pilot.
Our Take: What did we think? Are we desperate for more or desperate to get that hour back?
Sex and Skin: That’s all you care about anyway, right? We let you know how quickly the show gets down and dirty.
Parting Shot: Where does the pilot leave us? Hanging off a cliff, or running for the hills?
Sleeper Star: Basically, someone in the Future Man cast who is not the top-billed star who shows great promise.
Most Pilot-y Line: Pilots have a lot of work to do: world building, character establishing, and stakes raising. Sometimes that results in some pretty clunky dialogue.
Our Call: We’ll let you know if you should, ahem, Stream It or Skip It.

FUTURE MAN

Opening Shot: In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a family is running from armor-clad soldiers. When the family is cornered by one of the soldiers and is about to die, all of a sudden something blasts a hole in the soldier and spins the catchphrase, “Now that’s what I call a hole in one.”

The Gist: The guy who blasts the soldier is Future Man, who fights a few more soldiers and spins some more catchphrases before he wakes up. After that, we see that Future Man is really Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson), a guy well into adulthood who still lives with his parents (Ed Begley, Jr. and the late Glenne Headley) in his childhood home, which his dad grew up in, as well. He works as a janitor at Kronish Laboratories, where Dr. Elias Kronish (Keith David) keeps trying to find a cure for the herpes he was infected with on the night of the moon landing in 1969.

If Josh is good at anything, it’s video games. One night he finally gets past a level that keeps defeating him and finishes the game. He’s so satisfied, he settles down for some self-pleasure. Right then two people from the game, Tiger (Eliza Coupe) and Wolf (Derek Wilson) appear and, after a bit of an accident (ahem), they tell Josh that the video game is a recruitment tool from the 22nd century to find someone to defeat an army of biologically-invincible humanoids and save the human race as they know it.

It also turns out that they can travel through time (duh), so they take a reluctant Josh back to 1969. Even though Josh doesn’t have the battle skills he demonstrated on the video game, they tell Josh that Dr. Kornish eventually found a cure for herpes which led to a super-cure for all diseases and the rise of those immune humanoids. Their mission: to keep Kornish from getting herpes on the night of the moon landing. Since Josh knows Kornish, he turns out he can be a help after all.

Our Take: Future Man is from the producing team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (the showrunner is former Colbert Report producer Ben Karlin), so you have to expect a lot of bodily humor coming in. The pilot gives you plenty, between Josh accidentally finishing on Wolf to Josh’s video game store buddies talking about screwing Mario and other gaming icons. Some of the jokes are funny, some aren’t. Most aren’t really necessary to the plot of the show, and sometimes serve as more of a distraction.

The rest, though, is pretty fun. We’re not only intrigued by the time travel aspect of the show, we want to know just what the world Wolf and Tiger inhabits is like. Also, as with everything time-travel related, their actions in the past are going to have consequences in the future. For instance, the three land in Josh’s house, only now his no-good son is the kid and his grandparents are young. Of course a huge fight ensues, which we’ll likely see play out when he comes back to 2017.

Also funny: Eliza Coupe as Tiger. We’ve always loved Coupe, who tends to be the funniest person in whatever show she’s in, whether it’s the last season of Scrubs, Happy Endings or Benched. Now she gets to be funny and kick ass, which seems to be right in her sweet spot. As the three time travelers strategize at Canter’s Deli in 1969, she screams to everyone enjoying their pastrami that they’re all going to be dead eventually. That’s pure Coupe.

Sex and Skin: Other than Josh pleasuring himself in the scene described above, nada.

Parting Shot: After blasting their way out of Canter’s (long story) and blowing up a cop car, the trio speed down the street on motorcycles they took after beating up a biker gang (another long story) and set off to the frat party where Kronish contracted herpes.

Sleeper Star: Whenever we see Ron Funches, we smile. He plays a security guard at the lab, and his brief time on screen was pretty funny. Same with Haley Joel Osment, who plays an asshole research scientest who berates Josh before Dr. Kronish intervenes.

Most Pilot-y Line: Hm… worse than flying seamen? We can’t think of anything.

Our Call: Stream It. The pilot gave enough non-bodily laughs to lead us to think there will be more as Josh, Wolf and Tiger keep skipping through time. It’ll also be fun to see if Josh transforms into a tough warrior and fulfill his desire to change the world.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Future Man on Hulu