Would Futurama work better today instead of in yesteryear?

The early days of the Simpsons were a reflection upon the market of comedies at the time. It was an era of family sit-coms, the likes of Al Bundy and Bill Cosby providing America's laughs. By the late eighties, television viewers were surely feeling tired of the standard tropes of family-centric humor.

The Simpsons was a radical shift from what was on television. With extreme family dysfunction (to the point of child abuse) and the ludicrous lack of intelligence in nearly every character, the show subverted it's genre in a way few audiences had seen before.

A few years later, a cousin of The Simpsons hit the airwaves; its name was Futurama. The show premiered as a confluence of science fiction was permeating the networks. Several Star Trek shows abounded and a stream of lower budget nerd-shows were materializing all around. It seemed to be a prime time for the parody of this specific subculture.

The show was rife with geeky satire, from alien angst to robot idiocy (an entire episode was even devoted to Star Trek gags). The setting of the series allowed it to grow in ways that The Simpsons lagged. They had no requirement to follow America as it changed or even represent anything other than the ideas of the creators. Characters were allowed to grow and certain plot-lines could become serialized. It seemed that Futurama would have the possibility of surpassing its famous relative. Even the fickle critics enjoyed its ideas and wit.

What then occurred surprised Futurama's producers, media critics, and biggest fans: the series lasted only a fraction of The Simpsons life span. It was canceled relatively early, lost to the hazy realm of straight-to-DVD films.

The current climate of science fiction has changed from how it was those many years ago. The genre has sunk into the murk of irrelevance, outcropping into either campiness or inane superiority (sometimes a gross combination of the two). Like the sets of the Original Series, televised science fiction has become outdated. Even as visual effects allow producers to make their imaginary worlds more realistic, the stories can now merely strain believability in an effort to avoid clichés.

It seems that science fiction now occupies the same vessel that family comedies were voyaging in pre-Simpsons television. The degradation of this specific branch of entertainment is probably in the perfect place to be roasted by the satire of Futurama. If the shows' creators had waited until the post-climactic wake of the end of quality science fiction, maybe Futurama would have been the second bolt of lightning caught in a bottle.