floobie said:
- It's actually dynamic. You can see the characters growing and changing. Their relationships aren't static. The Simpsons basically hits the reset button every episode.
For the most part this is true, but there have been a great many changes in characters and relationships in the course of the show. Lisa became a vegetarian for example, significant named characters have died (Maude Flanders for instance) and there have even been divorces that get brought up again and again.
While Futurama has a bit more change in characters, the truth is, most of that change only happened because the future of the show was in doubt. Fry loved Leela since early on in season 1 and yet that relationships never moved forward in any significant way until the final episode of the original run and did not actually become anything resembling a proper boyfriend/girlfriend situation until the fourth movie. While various relationships and character traits have been added, these have largely been an effort to make the supporting cast a little more than one joke characters (e.g. Amy is clumsy).
floobie said:
- The setting. I love most anything sci-fi and urban. Futurama's bustling, futuristic, New New York scratches that itch a lot better than the Simpson's small town, suburban Springfield.
The setting
does allow for some things the Simpsons simply could not get away with, certainly, but for the most part the narrative core of most stories is no different than what the Simpsons deals with. I'll grant that the flexibility of Futurama is a big part of why I liked the show at all, but if you really step back and look you'll find there isn't a lot of difference in the broad strokes sense.
floobie said:
- The geeky humour is both stimulating and well executed. It isn't as in your face an "lol, look how nerdy we are, laugh at us!" as shows like Big Bang Theory.
I agree
entirely with this. How many other shows have jokes about computer science (the halting problem), advanced mathematics (transfinite numbers and graph theory), physics (lots and lots of them) and so forth? The strangest thing to me about Futurama was how shockingly well educated the writing staff was. A number of the original writers had graduate degrees in fields like economics, computer science, mathematics and so forth from significant universities.