I don't think Cohen, or perhaps the author of the Wired article, nailed how Futurama was subversive in a way other shows weren't:

"On The Jetsons, there's a machine that ties your tie for you," Cohen says. "On Futurama, there'd be a machine that tied your tie, but it would malfunction and start strangling you."

Um, what? Has Cohen never seen the closing credits of The Jetsons? Is the phrase "Help, Jane, stop this crazy thing!" not forever associated with that show? The Jetsons was rife with malfunctioning tech!

The author further underscores his/her (Chris Baker? Not sure) misunderstanding in the next graph:

Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama's undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen's brave new world. "The network's attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear," Groening says. "They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn't like the 'All-Tentacle Massage' parlor."

This is half-right. The random death and such is a little colder than the Simpsons. But there's lots of the macabre in the Simpsons -- Moe's numerous suicide attempts is only a small example of that undercurrent. No, what made Futurama different and strange to the execs who constantly pushed it under the heel of football (on the East coast) is that it was so full of the nerd side of pop culture that it was somewhat hostile to outsiders. For a variety of reasons that seems to be not as big a deal anymore. Which is great!

Hostility to outsiders is fantastic... when you're on the inside.

How weird is it that Matt Groening has never seen an episode of Star Trek. I really wanted the article to expound on this. By now, this must be a conscious decision to avoid watching episodes of the show. Has he seen any of the offshoot series?
Weird.

I've seen very few episodes of Star Trek myself, maybe 3 or 4 from the original series, 10 or so next generations, 1 or 2 voyagers, and some of the movies.

But you've seen SOME Star Trek. I have not seen many episodes of any incarnation either. I've never even seen Star Trek II, though I did read the book when I was 13 (it had pictures of the movie in it as well). But I have seen it. I agree with the Rodenator, it's odd. Has MG really never seen Star Trek? He was of age when it first came out. He never came across it?

I worked in theater for a long-ish time and had never watched Waiting for Guffman, which was to many a very large sin. Initially I just hadn't seen it, for no particular reason. After a while, I began to take pride in not having seen it and intentionally avoided watching it. I imagine Matt Groening probably fell into a similar pattern. At this point it would seem like giving up to go back and watch some Star Trek.

Also, seriously, where would you start?

PS. I've seen only a few episodes from TOS, all of the Next Generation, a season or so of Voyager, a season or so of Enterprise, the bulk of DS9 and, I think, all the movies.

Listing it out like that is mildly embarrassing. Star Trek put out a hell of a lot of content.

Oh, DS9, I think I saw a few of those as well.

I haven't seen the first 3 movies, but I'll probably go see the JJ Abrams one.

I can never make it through Waiting for Guffman.

there's lots of shit i've never seen: the godfather trilogy for example. but STAR TREK? there's just so fucking MUCH of it. obviously, at some point MG made the conscious decision to avoid it. but that's wicked dumb.

crazymonk -- jesus, rent the first three Treks already! what the fuck is wrong with you?

ps i miss when RD and i used to watch DS9 at 11am and hold hands -- er, i mean, NOT hold hands.

"rent the first three Treks already! what the fuck is wrong with you?"

says the person who has never seen Godfather I and II? (You can forget III.)

RD, sure, that's a lot of trek, but what about trek novels (Imzadi, anyone)? What about comic books? What about the animated series?

Books? Comics? No kidding:

http://www.rumorsdaily.com/2007/10/31/the-most-confusing-book-ever-writt...

Oh, that's right. I forgot you were the same guy.

Finally one of my posts sparks conversation. So we all seem to agree Groening made a conscious decision. It's one thing for someone to do this, but when someone who is creating a series that mocks many of ST's conventions it seems weirder that he never watched an episode for reference or something. Although you really don't need to have seen much Star Trek to understand or at least be pretty familiar with it.

By the way, Jon May, about the Jetson, one of the gimmicks of the show was that things were unbelievably good a lot of the time in their future, but people complained in the same manner that they do today. The one example that stands out was that George Jetson had a three-day work week... and complained about it to no end as if the four days of weekend time were somehow insufficient. While things did break down (the treadmill being the most obvious example) it was the fact that they were often complaining about relatively minor inconveniences when compared with the giant improvements on today's life that made the show funny.

Futurama did have a different take on the humor, often making the future's technological options much, much worse than the present's, but still with a superficially futuristic facade that made the failure more surprising (see the Probe-u-lator).