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Futurama Reviews: S11E01 -"Beef"

And here I thought an episode with this title was going to be a play on the Netflix show Beef.
Futurama is back once again and to be honest I would have assumed for the last time. Season eleven was the final season of the renewal that Hulu gave it back in 2023 and there had been no word since then of anything after. But at Comic-Con this year it was revealed that the show will be getting a twelfth season, though suspiciously in the form of three multi-episode length specials, which sounds a little bit like the direct-to-video movies from 2007 to 2009 that ultimately formed the show’s fifth season but at the time functioned in part like a last hurrah. The fact that only one additional season has been greenlit rather than two leads me to believe both Hulu and Futurama see these specials as the end -possibly allowing the show a little more time and grace for its next series finale. Granted, this season’s finale is titled “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion”, so it is a bit rich that the show at all is continuing past it.
But in the meantime perhaps a little bit of gravity can be lifted for the eleventh season, which has just begun on Hulu (and thankfully only one episode a week) with a very weird episode even by Futurama standards, about hot dog eating contests. It is another reveal of a previously unmentioned side of Fry’s life in the twentieth century -namely that he was apparently a champion hot-dog eater. It comes up in the context of the Planet Express crew going to Coney Island, checking out the various carnival attractions there and ultimately visiting a museum on hot dogs. There, Fry reveals his history as a hot dog eater (which he and the show very loosely conflate with athleticism), but in 1999 he lost the annual Coney Island contest to his obnoxious rival Brocky Jay. When he tries a hot dog in his usual speed-eating manner (i.e. swallowing it whole) he realizes the plant-based substitute for beef since the extinction of cows makes his method incompatible and further that hot dog eating contests are likewise a thing of the distant past and he has no outlet for what he characterizes as his one talent.
This focus for the episode is very strikingly American to me in a way few other Futurama episodes are -or maybe I just never see hot dog contests in the environment and circles I live in. The weight placed on such an activity is played for some satire, but there is a sense of real cultural import there too, as the show is something of a tribute to U.S. carnival culture and Coney Island especially. But the script by Ariel Landensohn goes on a significant detour after this sad revelation for Fry, along several beats towards allowing hot dogs of Fry’s time to re-exist in this world. Blunt reference is made to Jurassic Park in an attempt to clone cows from DNA in mosquitoes from Brazil, only for the result to wind up being clones of mosquitoes in what I’ll generously interpret as a pretty good joke about Jurassic World: Dominion. A second effort is made with the remains of the last wiener that Brocky had half-eaten before his death, which does manage to produce cloned cows. Here, Fry undergoes an awkward emotional whiplash of expressing sympathy to the cows and not wanting to butcher them, to setting them free -where they are promptly killed in traffic, which Fry then gets over very quickly. Then at last the Professor clones just the muscle fibre to make the hot dog wieners and it works, with Planet Express reintroducing “meat-based veggie dogs” to the world and providing a means for Fry to exercise his old skill again.
Most of this feels strictly unnecessary and a lot like filler for a show that isn’t constrained by network time limits anymore. Any one of the processes the crew used could have yielded results to move the story along -instead it was a series of false starts that if their conception was for a joke it wasn’t a particularly good or worthwhile one. The trip down to Brazil to obtain specifically Jurassic Park-style amber bugs and the cloned cows themselves are especially ancillary given where the direction the half-eaten wiener very clearly points in for the plot. Which we do eventually see with the anthropomorphic wiener creation that comes to life.
First though, the Planet Express crew has to go into hot dog sales (called “FarnDogs”) strictly for the show to have an excuse to make an ad in a different style of animation (something Futurama has become addicted to in recent years) and an excuse to make fun of anti-meat protesters. Once this reintroduction of hot dogs into the world is established, finally a hot dog eating contest is allowed and Fry gets back into shape for it. But at the competition, Fry is faced with his old nemesis -the anthropomorphic wiener is the reconstituted DNA of Brocky Jay, and wouldn’t you know it the contest boils down to the two of them after Horrible Gelatinous Blob is sabotaged (and potentially killed) by a little girl and one guy leaves when he finds out he doesn’t actually like hot dogs (one of the funnier jokes of the episode). Brocky though finds himself in unbearable pain, unable to get through the dogs in his current form and in a really fucked up turn comes to his redemption by convincing Fry to eat him alive. Which Fry does, thereby winning the competition and restoring his hot dog eating honour.
Conceptually unsettling though that ending is, it is sort of in-line with how the show operated in its earlier years. Episodes like “My Three Suns”, “Fry and the Slurm Factory”, and “The Problem with Popplers” come to mind. But “Beef” doesn’t come to that ending near as organically as those earlier episodes had. The concepts of cloning cows or indeed cloning Brocky could have yielded their own funny storytelling opportunities throughout, but instead the episode spun its wheels for its whole middle act to little value. There a good jokes scattered around, a couple funny Zoidberg lines, and I liked Leela’s increasing lust for Fry merely for his athletic credentials (not a bad use of her given the episode had nothing else to give Katey Sagal). But its premise is unremarkable (I’m sure it was reverse-engineered from its ending scene) and the episode runs at a rate that suggests it knows that.
Some stray observations:
  • “In loving memory of science”. A bit too soon. Futurama writers -please, have some tact.
  • Fry of course makes reference to attending Coney Island Community College, a joke you may remember from “Mars University” that didn’t need any of the expansion it gets here.
  • That history of hot dog vehicles was a bit of a stretch until it got to the Cyberweiner -which I understand is Elon Musk’s personal vehicle.
  • Fry: “I could have gone all the way.” Bender: “To what?” One of John DiMaggio’s better line-reads and a decent approximation of my response to this episode’s premise.
  • Zoidberg gave malaria to a mosquito.
  • While Fry is training, he eats a cereal carton full of salt. I remember him saying he once ate a big heaping bowl of salt (in “My Three Suns”), and apparently he hasn’t learned any lesson.
  • When Fry questions how Brocky still has his old memories, he claims it is because he read his own biography, and in audiobook form to get past the question of his not learning how to read. If the writers are trying to get ahead of fans complaining about stupid plot holes they could probably choose ones that people would actually question. I doubt any viewer would have cared at all about either of these points if there were no explanations.
  • Zoidberg when diagnosing why Brocky is feeling so catastrophically ill: “I don’t know, but it might be because you ate 82 hot dogs in nine minutes”. This might be a promising season for Zoidberg.
  • Here we are, season eleven of Futurama! Even with a renewal, I think we can all tell the show is once again approaching its end. But we’re not quite there yet and I’m open to the show surprising me. Last season had a few episodes I enjoyed a lot and I have no reason to believe this season won’t as well. Let’s go already!
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