How 'Futurama' Changed From Fry Being the Star to An Ensemble Animated Comedy

[Brian Damage]

Zap2it: Over the years, do you feel like the storytelling focus has shifted much? Fry was our way into the show, but it feels very much like an ensemble now.
Matt Groening: We've definitely changed the focus. At first we believed we needed to have one normal character at the center of this crazy fictional world, and we realized very quickly that wasn't important. However, it's still fun to see Fry figure things out, and the heart of the show is his relationship with Leela.

And if Fry was the relatable guy at first, he's clearly now not what you would call "normal."
No. The tendency in comedy is to have a character who's stupid get more stupid, because you're trying to top yourself and not just repeat. So the writers compete in having the characters do stupid things. One thing we're able to get away with because it's science fiction is we can sever various body parts, but they seem to be able to be grafted back on [laughs] with no scars. And that happens a number of times, in addition to, of course, the various heads in jars in the head museum.

The fact that celebrities and presidents in the future will be heads in jars in a museum [Groening laughs heartily at this thought] that no one visits is something nobody remarks on. They're just sitting on shelves. To me that's hilarious.

Because the show has been around a good while, do you find yourselves running into the problem of "Oh, we did that already"?
It gets more difficult to come up with something we haven't done before. We have a checklist: We're trying to be entertaining, we're trying to be funny, we're trying to work in the science fiction genre. Science fiction and comedy are generally a pretty bumpy mix. It gives us anxiety in putting it together. But I'm amazed -- we've come up with some pretty good stuff. I think this could be a regular, live-action science-fiction movie, this premise. So I'm pretty happy with that.

Does everyone kind of know intuitively know when that mix is getting a little too bumpy?
It's all an experiment. Again, you're trying to surprise yourself and also the audience, so we make some missteps every so often and then correct them. Every episode we have a table read and listen to the actors basically do it like a radio show, and that gives us a lot of insight as far as what's funny, but also sometimes it clarifies story problems or just that the premise may be too crazy or hard to make clear to the audience. There are some fairly sophisticated ideas [in the show], and to get them across in a half-hour show sometimes requires too much explanation. Sometimes we abandon ideas, and sometimes we throw the ideas up as a formula on a blackboard and say, "OK, we tried." For those who care, you can try to figure out the formula.

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