Network: NBC

Air Date: 1999

Writer: Matt Groening, David X. Cohen

Creator: Matt Groening, David X. Cohen

Stars: Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio

Premise: A delivery boy is cryogenically frozen in 1999. He emerges a thousand years later to fulfill his destiny as...a delivery boy.

Very few shows in the history of television have had as hard an act to follow as Futurama. You might have heard of Matt Groening's previous show, The Simpsons which received near universal acclaim en route to becoming a cultural institution. The stakes were high for Futurama, but the show did not disappoint.

The pilot comes out guns blazing, with a hilarious, smart, tightly executed arc. Nothing less than the meaning of life would do for the theme of Futurama's inaugural episode. Fry (West), a hapless delivery boy, expects a whole new lease on life after he finds himself a millennium in the future following a cryogenic mishap. His travels through time don't change much though: He is re-assigned his previous position as a delivery boy.

The pilot of Futurama is a triumph of scope and substance. So many of the great bits from the rest of the series begin here, from Nixon's head to Bender's drinking problem, as we are given a firm sense of the rules in this world. Bits alone wouldn't be enough to make this a great pilot though. What makes this episode great is that despite travelling a thousand years and through myriad well-drawn sets, Fry ends up exactly where he started. At the heart of this rollicking journey through the intricately constructed futuristic world is an examination of those huge existential questions that keep us up at night: Who, and why, are we?

Fry knows he's a delivery boy, but he is utterly unprepared for what that means for him in his new life. By the end of the pilot, he is both the same person he was before and fundamentally altered. We're excited to go on adventures with a man who knows he is a delivery boy, but has no idea what he will be delivering. —BG