In the US: Available on Hulu
Howard Overman has something of an affinity for aimless youth who end up on very important missions to save the world. He is, after all, the creator of Misfits, Atlantis and Crazyhead. The rather more famous Seth Rogen, meanwhile, has something of an affinity for feckless losers who spend all their time smoking weed, playing video games or both.
A match made in heaven surely? Well, now we have Future Man to find out, as Rogen exec-produces and co-directs this show based on an Overman idea (although not script). It sees Hunger Games‘ lesser star Josh Hutcherson playing ‘Josh Futturman’, an aimless 20-something still living with his parents (Ed Begly Jr and Glenne Headly) and who ‘works’ as a janitor at a STD research laboratory. There he’s bullied by Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense) but comes under the protective wing of the laboratory’s boss, Keith David, who’s trying to find a cure for herpes.
However, at night, he’s a top game player, dedicated to beating impossible first-person shooter ‘Future Man’, in which the world has been taken over by ‘biotics’ and he and comrades ‘Wolf’ and ‘Tiger’ are the head of the resistance.
When Hutcherson becomes the first person to ever beat the game, the real Wolf (Preacher‘s Derek Wilson) and Tiger (Eliza Coupe of Scrubs, Happy Endings, Wrecked, Benched) come back from the future to reveal that the game was a recruitment tool to discover the one person with the skills that could help prevent the biotics from really taking over. Together, Josh, Wolf and Tiger must go back in time to prevent the future from occurring. But is Josh out of his depth or does he have secret skills that just need developing?
Current man
As you might expect given its pedigree, the show is both smarter than it sounds and also reasonably bro-ish. But it’s not great. Most of the jokes are about masturbation, usually to female video game characters, but occasionally just about sex in general and they’re not exactly the subtlest (Coupe: “We’re going to [go back to] ’69 now” Josh: “What? Erm, okay… What’s he [Wilson] going to do? Watch?”). There are debates about the nature of video games themselves, with long discussions about the realism of Super Mario, gamers’ real-life psychological profiles and what would happen if you introduced video-game violence into the real world, with all its many consequences.
The show is also self-critiquing, with Josh’s initial suspicion that Coupe and Wilson are playing a joke on him growing from “Okay, so that’s The Last Starfighter” to “Okay, so that’s The Last Starfighter meets Quantum Leap“; the show uses The Terminator‘s typeface every time there’s time travel; and when Josh arrives back in his family home back in 1969, a Back To The Future sting plays. There’ll be more movie parodies to come in later episodes, too, judging by the trailer.
However, while there are certainly quite a few laughs to be had, normally from Hutcherson’s reations and Coupe and Wilson’s lack of cultural understanding rather than the cringe-worthy jokes, this doesn’t have either the production values or direction (Rogen co-directs the first episode) to really pull off what it’s trying to do, with many of the obviously stunt doubles’ faces visible during fights, for example. The cast is good, with Britt Lower (Man Seeking Woman), Paul Scheer (The League, Veep) and Ron Funches (Undateable) also showing up in so-far minor roles, but squandered by a script that has few of Overman’s cleverer or dirtier traits.
If you like Rogen’s brand of loser gross-out, embarrassment comedy and you like sci-fi movies, you might find Future Man appealing. If not, you’ll probably simply feel like me that this is a show that’s about five or ten years late to a party that’s just about over.
