Here's the thing about Hulu's Future Man, which stars The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson as a homebody gamer who gets recruited into an epic quest to save humanity's future: it's good. It has a lot going for it, including the cast, which also features Happy Endings' Eliza Coupe and Preacher's Derek Wilson. The idea of a go-for-broke time travel action comedy is solid and Future Man is nothing if not committed to certain elements of shock and awe laughs.

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Where the series falters somewhat (I've watched all of Season 1, which premiered this past Tuesday) is actually in that very commitment. Occasionally the series, which goes all in on gross-out visual humor, becomes its own worst enemy by going overboard with raunch. There's nothing inherently wrong with comedic vulgarity, but in order to make the crass elements funny there also needs to be some restraint. Netflix's Big Mouth ran into these issues recently as well, where all of a sudden creators land on a streaming service and have license to, basically, do and show what ever they want without fear of advertisers, demographics, or decency standards and a certain unmeasurable quantity of "funny" gets lost in their gusto to put absolutely everything out there.Future Man stumbles in this regard, as moments within the season involving soaring ejaculate, broken fingers, herpes sores, and many other instances of visual ickiness work to undercut the silliness that's already present. Future Man reminds me of when the Farrelly brothers struck oil with Dumb & Dumber and There's Something About Mary and then tried to hit us with Say It Isn't So, which was just a long string of gross gotcha gags stitched together. Yes, when it comes to disgusting sight gags, Future Man sometimes can't get out of its own way.I can't give you an actual example of this without spoiling too much but the fact remains that, often times, characters talking about something gross that's already happened, that we've seen, is way more funny than actually seeing it. Less is usually more with Future Man. as the premise itself, and the story's fun approach to a drawn-out/disaster-filled time travel mission is entertaining on its own. Now, it may also be that we didn't need 13 episodes, and those episodes possibly didn't need to clock in at 30 full minutes (or more) each, but that's just part of the usual package of excess that comes with the streaming model.Now, here are all the ways Future Man holds up. I mentioned the cast back at the top, but I'll do so again. These are great roles, primarily for the three leads (Hutcherson, Coupe, and Wilson) and there are some really dazzling moments where they're able to truly shine. Coupe is incredible as Tiger, a hardened rebel leader from a ravaged dystopian future who travels back to 2017 because she thinks the video game she created, Biotic Wars, has found her a "savior." Wilson, as Wolf, is Tiger's alpha male right hand and his arc, throughout the season, is a fabulous feast. Both Tiger and Wolf, throughout the mission, discover sensitive sides of themselves that they never could afford to acknowledge in the traumatic (future) time they grew up in.Hutcherson gets to play the straight man of the trio, Josh (yes, Josh), though the role's not without laughs as Josh's constant attempt to thwart a future hellscape in a non-violent, peaceful way possible (clashing with Tiger and Wolf's crazed kill 'em all harshness) usually winds up making everything exponentially worse, and proving his hard-nosed future buddies' ideas about a scorched earth approach correct. There's also the ever-present theme of "no matter what action these three take, good or bad, the future is pretty much f***ed."Keith David, Haley Joel Osment, Ed Begley Jr., and Glenne Headly (whose character sadly had to become an off-screen one after she died during production last July) round out the capable cast as supporting characters who change and transform with each failed attempt to fix the future by changing the past. After a while (and Future Man does take about three or four episodes to find a decent groove), part of the fun becomes watching how Josh, Tiger, and Wolf have inadvertently changed people in the name of trying to save the world.There's a true comedy of errors/caper quality to Future Man and with that comes, refreshingly, a streaming series that feels like a segmented TV show. Yes, Hulu is releasing all of Season 1 at once for binge purposes, but these episodes actually feel like separate pointedly-themed chapters of a story and not just shapeless parts of one long movie. Each episode, usually, is a specific (ill-fated) mission to course correct something awful and because of that there are natural breaks for viewers. You don't have to chug this series if you don't want to.Future Man, with its hit or miss quality, leans into some well-worn tropes while also bucking some others quite brilliantly. Executive produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who also directed the first two episodes), and created by writers Ariel Shaffir and Kyle Hunter (Sausage Party), the series is a strange mix of really cool and inventive ideas and tired toilet humor that lands with a thud. Sometimes too there are odd movie references inserted in (from Midnight Cowboy to Top Gun to Crocodile Dundee) that are apropos of not very much, but then other times the show takes actual mind-bending elements from other sci-fi projects (Back to the Future, The Matrix, etc) and goes a few steps further with them into some twisted, and often funny, territory.