Season 2, Episode 3: "A Head in the Polls" (A)

Heyyy sugar cookie! You know, legally, nothing I can do counts as sex anymore!

If I had to pinpoint the moment that Futurama went from being merely a terrific new show into one of the best things on network television, I would probably wind up circling back to two episodes early in the second season: “Xmas Story”, and this episode. They both make fantastic and fulfilling use of the show’s universe, though to two totally different ends. “Xmas Story” creates a rich, emotionally rewarding narrative, while “A Head In the Polls” goes all-in on creating a brutally hilarious satire. Taken together, they’re a fantastic introduction to the range the show is capable of, and a great way to see what common elements really define an episode of Futurama as Futurama.

Political satire is not a safe, or easy, thing for a prime-time sitcom to tackle. Take a side, and you risk alienating half your audience. Posit that “they’re all a bunch of crooks”, and you get dismissed as lazy. Pretend that it’s all meaningless and you get lambasted as undermining what little civic virtue we have left. Worst of all, you run the risk of being instantly dated -- witness how poorly a show like Murphy Brown has aged by taking on hot-button issues and personalities of the day.

The biggest potential pitfall a sitcom runs in tackling politics or political issues is forcing its characters to serve as mouthpieces or suffer object lessons rather than function naturally. Futurama already showed in the first season’s “A Big Piece of Garbage” that it preferred a dark joke to a warm message, and “A Head In the Polls” shows that its characters are well-developed enough that their politics are natural extensions of their personalities. Fry is apathetic, Leela is a pushy do-gooder, The Professor is venal, and Bender is a non-voting felon. The crew wandering the various party booths at a registration drive doesn’t just deliver some wonderful gags -- it also manages to lampoon single-issue radicals, platforms and promises, and voter apathy about those things.

But after that sequence, the show takes a detour as a titanium shortage prompts Bender to sell his body (he’s 40% titanium!) for the now substantial sum it’s worth. But almost as soon as one might assume this is the A-plot and the first act was a Simpsons-esque unrelated adventure, the two threads are pulled together, as Richard Nixon’s Head buys Bender’s body and jumps into the race for President of Earth.

Think for a moment, if you will, just how absolutely loonballs that sounds. How loonballs that is. What other show, what other set-up, could feature the protagonist literally selling their body, cavorting with shelves of presidential heads, and finding their body purchased from a pawn shop by the only American President to resign in disgrace… Who is now running for President of Earth, playing Jefferson Airplane on a hocked guitar and kissing babies he’s keeping in his chest cavity? Science Fiction has always been used to create allegories that comment on the present day, and Futurama’s trump card will always be the ability to marry that to the visual potential and sensibilities of a cartoon, to create exaggerated, over-the-top satire leavened with chaotic visual gags.

Richard Nixon’s Head as a recurring character on the series is one of my favorite decisions the creators made. Instead of creating an allegorical figure, they resurrect a name from recent history whose strongest supporters can at best refer to him as a “tragic, Shakespearean figure.” If there were any figure from the 20th Century who deserved to be resurrected simply to kick around a little more, Nixon would have to be near the top of the list, and I’m glad that Futurama decided to use him as shorthand for everything corrupt, cynical, and possibly deranged, about politics. Even when the writers attempt to give him his due as having opened up relations with China, the next line has him -- and everyone else in the room -- laughing hysterically at the thought of appealing to his “sense of decency.”

But for all the fantastic, hilarious, utterly deserved jokes at the expense of our first and only supervillain President, and plenty of sideswipes at political issues (my favorite comment on American exceptionalism has long been Fry’s, “America is part of the world? Wow, I have been gone a long time!”), there is a clear and definite target of this satire. But rather than the usual lazy sitcom targets, Futurama takes more of a Daily Show/Colbert Report approach: this stuff is important, the show says, but the pageantry and ritual we’ve constructed around it sucks all meaning, import, and integrity out of it. Nine channels of C-Span and Bernard Shaw hypothetical questions (even if under a Truth-o-scope) do not a healthy Civitas make.

The final kicker -- that one vote really did make a difference, and that the show’s lone voice of reason and responsibility is the one who dropped the ball -- is the perfect Futurama capper. While the show has a real, tender heart built on outcast characters who come together to form a sort of family, it never lets you forget that the reason you need a family in the first place is because of how weird and cruel and dangerous the world is, often in no small part due to our own individual screw-ups. The show’s sense of black comedy never lets that point get lost for long, and it’s part of what makes the show so enduring, and an episode like “A Head in the Polls” feel as fresh today as it did nearly fifteen years ago.

And did I mention how riotously funny this episode is? It’s a quotable treasure trove not just of political gags (“The less fortunate get all the breaks!”) but of solid animated joke construction. Particular favorites are the jump cut from Fry declaring at the pawn shop that his clothes are worth fifty dollars to him sitting in his naked glory on the couch at home, and Bender admonishing a couple in the Watergate to, “Get a room,” and, when they point out they’re already in one, to, “Lose some weight!” There’s also great little moments like Bender’s 3-D RC car ride through the Planet Express offices, Leela’s cute little automated grappling hook, and the reveal of our new “gargantuan cyborg overlord”. Even if you have no interest in how Futurama demonstrates effective techniques for political satire, or care at all about politics or history, the show is still damn funny. Unlike next week’s episode, “Xmas Story”, this one shows Futurama going all out for laughs in its own smart, darkly funny way. Much like a classic episode of Seinfeld there’s no hugging, and no learning, but as we’ll see, the genius of the show is its ability to go from that extreme to an episode that’s all hugging and learning, without either sacrificing laughs, or its comic sensibility.

GRADE: A

This Week’s Opening Title Subtitle:

From the makers of Futurama!

This Week’s In Futurama Signage:


(ROOK TAKES PAWNSHOP)

Stray Observations:

-The episode kicks off with an episode of “The Scary Door”, Futurama’s in-house Twilight Zone parody. In this outing, it’s some hilarious work by Maurice LaMarche in a send up of the classic episode “Time Enough at Last”.

-The “Scary Door” intro features just the first of a huge number of freeze-frame visual gags, such as books like “The Red Dwarf of Courage” and “The Newer Testament”. The Head Museum provides another bounty, although apparently the writers ran out of names of actual porn stars, resulting in the appearance of “Samuel Genitals” and “Jill Big Breasts”.

-Morbo is fantastic this episode, particularly his banter with “Good friend”/”Evil underdog” Richard Nixon.

-Had no idea that George Washington hocked his teeth for booze money. Huh! Ya learn something new every day.

-I love the Professor’s honest disdain for helping the less fortunate, and his resentment of any restrictions on his second amendment right to doomsday devices.

-I like the fact that one of the episode’s subtle lessons is that even though the two major party candidates -- who are utterly identical right down to their DNA -- are banal, bland, and offer utterly no change from the status quo, they’re still <i>better than the alternative</i>. If that isn’t darkly, bitterly hilarious, I don’t know what is.

-Billy West’s Nixon is just a brilliant comic creation. Sure, it bears increasingly little resemblance to the actual Nixon, but hey, he’s gotten bitter, and let’s face it, crazy over the years! Once he’s swept into office, he’ll sell our kids organs to zoos for meat, and slip into people’s houses at night and wreck up the place! Muahahahahahaha!