Future Man knows its setup is derivative from the start — Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson) references The Last Starfighter and Quantum Leap as a pair of time-traveling warriors call on his assistance in a battle far in the future. But while the premise of a boy who is unlucky in life but proficient in gaming pressed into fighting a war by traveling through time may sound familiar, Future Man’s approach is refreshingly fun — and lewd — thanks to producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

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“ The modern-day cast is full of hilarious supporting characters.

NYCC 2017 Cosplay 124 IMAGES

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“ Future Man can fall prey to too much nostalgia, but it finds fun ways of subverting cliches.

The team behind This Is the End, Sausage Party, and more outrageous comedies hold nothing back in their TV endeavors (see their adaptation of Preacher for a dramatic example), and Future Man is no exception. The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson plays Josh Futturman, a janitor for a research lab looking into cures for sexually transmitted diseases who still lives at home with his parents and uses an “unbeatable” game, The Biotic Wars, to escape from his life.Only, his escape soon becomes his life when, after defeating the undefeatable final level of the game, the two main characters — Tiger and Wolf (Eliza Coupe and Derek Wilson, respectively) — appear in his bedroom and catch him in a compromising situation. The juvenile, gross, and funny punchline for that scene is a good litmus test for whether you’ll want to stick with the show. And even as a fan of Rogen and Goldberg’s previous work, it’s… a very gross scene. (It’s also a scene that could have saddled Tiger as simply an objectified character, but the rest of the episode goes on to serve her much better, and Coupe is equally funny and badass in the role.)The pilot mostly leaves the present day behind for the ‘60s in its second half, which is only a disappointment in that the supporting cast of 2017 is so strong. Ron Funches, Keith David, and Haley Joel Osment round out the staff of Josh’s lab, and they all offer memorable but brief introductory scenes. The show will return to the present, but a butterfly effect will undoubtedly cause some changes.For more NYCC coverage, check out IGN's cosplay gallery below:1969 holds plenty of great fodder for Josh, Tiger, and Wolf, though. And yes, that includes a brief back-and-forth about “going to ‘69” that results from Tiger and Wolf having a Drax-like level of humor. There are the expected fish-out-of-water jokes — Wolf is so used to eating rats that a deli pickle is a delicacy to him — but Coupe and Wilson also play up the self-seriousness of their characters impeccably. As the duo battles with a group of bikers to steal era-appropriate clothes, they narrate every kick, punch, and stab while moving in a stilted enough way to look like their in-game counterparts.Comparatively, Josh is the worst fighter these two could have hoped for in their savior, and one of the biggest laughs of the episode comes in his first “fight scene.” It mostly involves Josh getting pummeled by a surprising group of foes not worth spoiling just after arriving in 1969.Unfortunately its handling of video games as a main, driving plot point is less intriguing. The series pays some lip service to games at the start — BioShock and Halo get name-dropped, while a discussion about Luigi’s anatomy is a funny way to kick things of. But the premiere then settles into only depicting games as bloody affairs that obsessively pull players away from their lives. If the pilot is any indication, Future Man isn’t really acting as a commentary on gaming culture, but it certainly has plenty of room to play with there depending on how much of a focus the show spends on Josh’s love of gaming in the future.