Hulu's "Future Man" is Another Serializing Fail

A couple of months ago I watched the Hulu original series Future Man because the commercials made it seem interesting.  The basic premise is that a slacker named Josh Futterman, who uses the screen name "Future Man" finally beats a video game and is then visited by the two characters in the game--Tiger and Wolf.  It turns out the "game" is really a simulator sent to the past to find a genius to save humanity.  Which as Josh points out is pretty much the premise of The Last Starfighter.

The show has plenty of fun bits but the problem is that trying to stretch it into a 13-episode series of half-hour-ish episodes the plot ends up having to be padded.  It's not quite as boring as Netflix's The Punisher was; in this case the plot ended up with a lot of unnecessary complications.

Josh is a janitor at a medical research company that's trying to come up with a cure for herpes because its founder (Keith David) has herpes.  But in trying to cure herpes, in the future they create a universal cure that leads to a race of genetically "superior" humans who try to wipe out all the "inferiors." 

When Josh conveniently learns how the company founder got herpes, he convinces the two Resistance fighters to take him back to 1969, the night of the moon landing.  At a college frat party he "cockblocks" the future founder of the company to keep him from getting herpes.  Problem solved, right?  Nope.  He just gets herpes from someone else!  And Josh left his iPhone in the past so it was "invented" by a guy named Lamar who called it "Black Apple" or "Blapple" instead.

There's the first set of complications.  After this trip through time, they find their time travel device is low on fuel--Cameronium.  Of course there's none to be had in 2017, but enemy agents in the present might have more.  So they concoct a scheme to poison everyone at the company XMas party; the theory being the agents from the future won't suffer any ill effects.  Which in the process reveals the one woman who's shown any interest in Josh at the company is of course an enemy agent they have to take captive.

From her they find out the fuel they need for the their time travel will be discovered by James Cameron on an undersea dive in 2023.  So with the last of their fuel they go to 2023 to James Cameron's smart house, which is powered by a system called SIGORN-E.  (It's not voiced by Sigourney Weaver and James Cameron does not appear anywhere.)  Wolf makes nice with the house and it eventually helps them get the Cameronium.

But the pure Cameronium is unstable and causes Josh and Wolf to swap penises.  Eventually they decide to go back to 1985 and stop the founder of the medical research company from continuing his work and get him on a boat with his true love.

This introduces a new set of complications.  First, it turns out the guy's true love is a dude!  And while working on that, Josh ends up at his parents' house and almost does a Back to the Future with his mom.  Meanwhile, Wolf finds he really loves 1985--especially coke!  While Josh and Tiger go back to the present, Wolf stays behind to start his own exotic restaurant where people eat really weird shit like rat miscarriage. 

Though Josh got his boss on the boat, of course that doesn't work.  Instead the guy's lover dies and he accelerates his research.  Fed up with this, Tiger decides to just go back to 1949 and kill the guy as a baby, but instead becomes his nanny for three years.  Meanwhile, Josh finds he has a more successful and "extreme" version of himself called Joosh living in his parents' house and that he put his parents in a crappy retirement home.

Eventually Tiger returns to the present and then goes back to save Wolf, who has become so addicted to coke that he has to take it anally.  Thanks to his future training and stuff it only takes him a half-day to kick the habit and get back on track.  So then finally they can storm the company's headquarters to try to take it out once and for all.

So along the way there are a lot of complications, most of which wouldn't be necessary if you were just making a 2-hour-ish movie.  But because it's a 13-episode series, you need all these complications to keep things going.  It gets a little ridiculous by the time pretty much a whole episode focuses on Wolf in the 80s-90s.  I mean at some point you know they're going to take out the company, so just get to it!

That can be the problem with TV shows vs movies.  Maybe if they'd done like a lot of shows and made it only 10 episodes it would have been better.  Still, it's not a bad series. For the most part I enjoyed it.  It was just maybe too much of a good thing.