Future Man is a crude sci-fi comedy with a brain at heart

Future Man is SBS’s latest mixed-genre series that takes a few episodes to get into — but the time spent pays off.

Josh Hutcherson, Eliza Coupe and Derek Wilson in an episode of Future Man.

Eddie Cockrell gives his top recommendations for this week’s viewing on the box.

-

FREE PICK

Somebody in the acquisition/programming department of the SBS empire has a weakness for crude comedy, as evidenced by the recent Australian free-to-air premieres of such proudly profane and exuberantly salacious fare as Canada’s Letterkenny, Britain’s Plebs and others.

Fans of this genre will want to take note of the belated premiere of Future Man, a sci-fi comedy series that premiered in 2017 on Disney-owned American streaming service Hulu and is co-executive-produced and initially directed by the comedy team of childhood friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Series creators Howard Overman, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir seem heavily influenced by the Rogen/Goldberg brand of dude-centric humour from Superbad to Sausage Party on the big screen and TV’s Preacher and The Boys. Yet Future Man is its own thing that takes three or four episodes to rev up but is a shrewd and saucy genre mash-up.

In modern-day Pasadena, California, twenty-something slacker Josh Futterman (Josh Hutcherson) still lives at home with eccentric yet lovingly supportive parents Gabe (Ed Begley Jr) and Diane (Glenne Headly, who succumbed to a pulmonary embolism halfway through the first season’s production schedule and to whom the series is dedicated). He works as a janitor at a medical research facility run by Dr Elias Kronish (Keith David), who is determined to find a cure for the herpes he contracted from a woman at a fraternity party the night of the first moon landing in 1969 (stay with it, the plot point matters).

Josh is somewhat of a loner, spending most of his free time — check that, every waking hour — playing the future-set action video game Biotic Wars. Considered unbeatable but long out of fashion among the gaming cognoscenti, the game posits a harsh future of oppression and death. When he actually wins the game, he is visited and reluctantly recruited by Tiger (Eliza Coupe) and Wolf (Derek Wilson), resistance fighters from the future who reveal the game was used to scout the Saviour they expect to return with them to defeat the, uh, Biotics.

Sci-fi fans will already have noted the references to The Last Starfighter, The Terminator and Back to the Future: the ultraviolent and culturally clueless Tiger and Wolf are shocked to discover Josh is somewhat less than heroic, but he acquits himself when they transport in episode two to July 20, 1969 and he successfully prevents the younger Kronish (Cedric Sanders) from contracting the viral infection with a manoeuvre known by a term unprintable here. In this way, Future Man does a little time travelling of its own, as production designer Jessica Kender’s evocative recreation of the era matches that of Quentin Tarantino’s recent hit film Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood — two years before that film was even made.

“You’re not the future man I thought you’d be,” Tiger reluctantly admits to Josh. “But you are Future Man.” Stateside audiences and critics agreed, with Hulu preparing to unveil season three in early April.

Future Man, Thursday, 9.25pm, Viceland.

-

FREE BITES

Bluey: Tuesday-Friday, 8am, ABC Kids

Winner of a Logie and AACTA gong as best children’s TV show, the slyly educational and utterly charming animated adventure Bluey is back for a second series on ABC, and if you are, or know, the parents of a preschooler you’re aware exactly how seismic this news is. Created by writer Joe Brumm and modelled on British show Charlie and Lola, Bluey follows the lives of the six-year-old titular blue heeler, who learns about life and family with little sister Bingo and parents Bandit and Chilli. In the first of 52 seven-minute episodes this season, Bingo gets three chances to put her parents in Dance Mode but finds herself with little choice. Subsequent stories involve a home improvement store, a game of squash and Bandit’s nits. “Made under one roof in Brisbane,” boasts the new season’s press kit, and the talented crew at Ludo Studio have again produced a show that is colourful, sonically stimulating and, that rarest of feats, equally appealing to kids and those who love them. Why, it’s enough to once again suspend the “no TV before brekkie” rule.

Cocaine: Living with the Cartels. Sunday, 10.40pm, SBS

“The coke in London I’d say does the job,” says 27-year-old public relations consultant Amber who, along with commensurately ordinary airport load operator Louis, model and makeup artist Chanel and supermarket worker Troi, has been selected for this two-part Channel 5 import in which they’re educated about the provenance, effect and impact their drug of choice has on lives from the UK to South America. So after discovering the current Manchester product is the most potent at 78 per cent, they’re whisked off to Colombia and trade epicentre Medellin (Pablo Escobar T-shirts available), where Amber and Louis interview a gang contract killer — a Sicario — with the former stuffing it up by asking him for pictures of the kids from which he’s hidden his vocation. And that’s just in this first episode; subsequently the show takes them upriver on the Amazon embedded with the Colombian navy, where Chanel and Troi discover a thick, greenish and toxic brew used to cut their favourite party stimulant (hint: fertiliser and battery acid are involved). It would be interesting to know how producers-directors Johnny McDevitt and George Vernon arranged access and insurance.

You Can’t Ask That. Wednesday, 9pm, ABC

“Fire can do whatever it wants,” says Yugambeh and Minyungbal woman Rachel Cavanaugh, one of nine fireys from around Australia interviewed for the season five premiere episode of the ABC series You Can’t Ask That. Expanded from an exploration of the marginalised residents featured in previous half-hours, these eight episodes will include a series of probing, anonymously submitted questions to Olympic and Paralympic medallists and kids. Meanwhile, this diverse assemblage of the heroes who run towards conflagrations as others retreat will give their thoughts on queries such as “What’s it like being face-to-face with a wall of flames?” to “Do you rescue cats up trees” and, perhaps inevitably, “Did you become a firey just to get in the nude calendar?”. Producer Kirk Docker remembers approaching fresh topics after some 38 episodes to date thusly: “We looked at the show as though it was a series of collector’s cards. What was missing if you were to go, ‘I want the full set?’.” Viewer numbers suggest they want the full run, and this series is a worthy and welcome addition to the collection.

-

PAY PICK

Celia Imrie, Olivia Edward, Mikey Madison, Hannah Alligood and Pamela Adlon in season 4 of Better Things.

AWAITING EVEN BETTER THINGS

“You were always so good off the page,” a director (Jeffrey Nordling, from Big Little Lies) tells working actor and mother of three Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon) after she auditions for a voice part she’d previously had for a decade but will subsequently lose to a dead guy whose hours of tapes will be repurposed for the role. While that’s par for the course in Hollywood, the line also serves as an entirely appropriate self-endorsement of sorts for Better Things star-director-showrunner-co-writer Adlon, who is perhaps cable television’s best-kept secret and whose distinctly autobiographical show is stronger and more rewarding than ever in the upcoming second episode of a thus-far splendid fourth season.

As a brief recap, Adlon’s Fox is the single mother of three girls, mercurial college-age eldest Max (Mikey Madison), androgynous middle child Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and kind-hearted youngest Duke (Olivia Edward). They live in an eccentrically decorated and appealingly comfortable San Fernando Valley house, right next door to Sam’s increasingly infirm but headstrong mother Phyllis (Celia Imrie, from the Bridget Jones films). Sam enjoys a busy career and demonstrates the patience of Job with both her professional acquaintances and family, determined to keep it all together and make it all work.

A tight-knit group of friends helps enormously, and in this episode, ominously titled She’s Fifty, they include her gay best friend Rich (The Drew Carey Show standout Diedrich Bader), who is comforted in the wake of a failed relationship by the wise words of Duke, and newcomer Lenny (Cree Summer), who is going through a painful divorce and accompanies Sam on an eventful trip to the gym.

Like a less mannered and more benevolent Seinfeld without the laugh track, Better Things is a show that takes great care to find the entertaining humanity in the minutiae of everyday life (“Smaller is better,” Adlon told a New Yorker writer last year). Thus, after last week’s graceful season debut, in which Max and Frankie arrive at the airport after visiting their deadbeat dad, Xander (Matthew Glave, unseen thus far this series), and the house seems for once relatively free of the type of conflict on which this show thrives, She’s Fifty revels in the daily grind: Sam’s Mommy van is stolen, she must use a nappy when stuck in a traffic jam with Lenny, her neighbour complains Phyllis has been swimming naked in their pool, the kids use her credit card to buy a chinchilla, of course Sam cooks up a storm, and so on.

In a telling through-line that suggests what audiences are in for this season, she buys a garish electric car, but when it loses its charge on a deserted stretch of road she impulsively acquires a vintage, mint-condition El Camino SS pick-up truck from a seemingly ominous yet inevitably warm-hearted petrol station owner (a surprise cameo by the great genre character actor Lance Henriksen). “Mom, this car doesn’t fit all of us,” says Frankie, ever practical. “I know,” says their loving mother. “Too bad, sucka, that’s what you get for buying a chinchilla behind my back.” This is precisely the kind of show Better Things strives to be, and is.

The 53-year-old Adlon has been doing voice-over work and acting since she was nine, and won a prime-time Emmy award for voicing Bobby Hill on creator Mike Judge’s animated comedy King of the Hill (her audition in this episode is for the reboot of a show called Ching of the Mill, and Judge has a cameo). “Welcome to my midlife crisiiiiiiiiiis!” Sam yells exultantly, and you can’t help but think Pamela Adlon has found the key to art imitating life.

Better Things, Monday, 9pm, Fox One and Foxtel On Demand.

-

PAY BITES

The Lost Corvette. Saturday, 4.30pm, A&E

The iconic Chevrolet Corvette, named for the small British warship, was to celebrate its 30th anniversary as America’s sports car in 1983, but skyrocketing fuel costs and the legislation on engine efficiency threw a spanner in the works for the company and it was never put into production. Cut to the present, where Corvette super-enthusiast and Gotham Comedy Club owner Chris Mazzilli deploys the resident expert staff of his Dream Car Restorations business in New York to remedy this gap year anomaly by using existing sketches and schematics — only one pilot car of 43 built survived, and was in Kentucky — to build what was meant to be the brand’s fourth-generation coming-out. He takes some advice from the former chief and handling engineers Rick Darling and Dave McLellan, but decides to make some executive decisions. “Is this guy out of his freakin’ mind?” asks one staffer, but the resulting car is striking and their process will mesmerise viewers for the full hour.

Westworld, Seasons one and two. Saturday, 10am-Sunday, 7.50am, Box Sets

Westworld, Season three. Monday, 12pm, Foxtel Showcase

If ever the word “reboot” was an accurate and appropriate description of a well-established show’s new season, it would be for the third series of the dazzlingly — some would say frustratingly — complex Westworld (which, of course, is itself a reboot of the 1973 movie written and directed by Michael Crichton). In preparation for the more traditional action narrative of the new, Box Sets is offering the complete, chronological run of the old, all 20 hours of the science-fiction western from Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan (Christopher’s younger brother). From the still-visionary idea of a hi-tech Old West-themed adult amusement park hosted by hyper-intelligent androids who cater to guests’ every whim — Westworld has become, in its newer incarnation, a slightly more straightforward action adventure that shifts some of the narrative to corporate skulduggery in a hi-tech future Los Angeles. Aaron Paul, Lena Waithe, John Gallagher Jr and Vincent Cassel (as the new heavy) join the largely intact returning cast, and to give anything away would betray what’s becoming a great adventure.

The Taxi Cab Rapist. Saturday, 9.30pm, Crime + Investigation

A far less lurid hour than the blunt name suggests, this 2018 ITV investigation of the nearly decade-long series of sexual assaults on women by London cabbie John Worboys is more of a moral diatribe against official bungling of his case than a detailed dramatic recreation of the crimes themselves. As she must, presenter Susanna Reid, usually found alongside Piers Morgan on the network’s Good Morning Britain, traces Worboys’s dodgy past as a porn actor and male stripper. Yet she also proves a strong advocate for some of the brave victims who come forward to tell their shocking stories: Worboys would work late evening shifts, explain an unexpected windfall by displaying a bag of money, and drug his victims with a glass of champagne before assaulting then dumping them at their doorsteps. With overwhelming evidence brought to trial and 14 brave women testifying against him, Worboys pleaded not guilty on 23 counts but was sentenced to a minimum eight-year sentence. Reid saves her full ire for the astonishing decision to parole him — which was quickly walked back to two life sentences. This is the kind of probing yet caring investigative journalism that television should, but rarely does, strive to achieve.

-