Matt Groening Said Getting ‘Futurama’ Started Was “The Worst Experience of My Grown-Up Life’
Fans of science fiction will surely agree that Futurama is one of the best TV shows in recent history.
It is definitely a classic, offering viewers the perfect mix of comedy and a peek into what is yet to come. The show is unique in more ways than one — not only has it been canceled and revived, which is something we definitely don’t see all that often, but it also managed to incorporate some brilliant factors into the production of each and every episode.
How so? Well, to start, the writers incorporated math jokes on a regular basis, and they also managed to portray the show as being 1000 years into the future all while making it fit in with current times and humor. Some great minds were definitely behind the creation of one of our favorite animated television series, and looking back, most people wouldn’t change a thing about it.
However, there are a few secrets that no one knew of, at least that is until now.
Let’s discuss how Matt Groening said that getting Futurama started was “The worst experience of my grown-up life.”
The premise of ‘Futurama’
So, for those who aren’t familiar with the popular show, what is Futurama all about? Well, it is an animated, science-fiction comedy that takes place in the year 2999. Starring Billy West, Katey Sagal, Lauren Tom, and more, the successful show tells the story of Fry, a pizza delivery person who accidentally gets cryogenically frozen on the job.
He wakes up in a futuristic world and goes to work delivering packages for his great-great-great-great-great-grand-nephew. Viewers will love seeing New York City as it is run by aliens and robots, and explores the workplace as it is envisioned to be like many years down the road.
The creators were already successful
As Futurama fans already know, the show was created by Matt Groening, who already had brought us the extremely successful, long-running animated show, The Simpsons.
Many fans might think that having him create another show would bring instant success, but that wasn’t exactly the case this time around. The show ran for four seasons before being canceled, and although it was eventually brought back to television, it didn’t come without its obstacles.
According to Groening via Mental Floss, the network thought that Futurama was “too dark and mean-spirited’ and also that they “thought they had made a huge mistake” in ordering it in the first place.
The network kept moving the show to various time slots, which caused ratings to go down. Apparently, Fox didn’t exactly give it a fair chance, and it was almost doomed from the very beginning.
Matt Groening said that getting ‘Futurama’ started was a bad experience
Although the show eventually garnered a huge fan base, Groening remembers that getting it started was ‘By far the worst experience of my grown-up life.”
He felt that the Fox network was passing on their frustrations to him and driving him crazy in the process and that they set the show up to fail even before things got started.
Even so, Groening and the rest of the team that worked with him kept their eye on the prize, and we are sure glad that they did. Despite the negativity from Fox, they refused to quit and gave the show everything that they could. Groening says that he was going head to head with the network, but ultimately “I resisted every step of the way.”
It would appear that, just like the show he created, Groening was able to predict the future by knowing that it definitely deserved a spot on television.
