In Disenchantment, viewers will be whisked away to the crumbling medieval kingdom of Dreamland, where they will follow the misadventures of hard-drinking young princess Bean, her feisty elf companion Elfo, and her personal demon Luci. Along the way, the oddball trio will encounter ogres, sprites, harpies, imps, trolls, walruses, and lots of human fools.
“Ultimately," says Matt Groening, “Disenchantment will be about life and death, love and sex, and how to keep laughing in a world full of suffering and idiots, despite what the elders and wizards and other jerks tell you.”
I suppose I’m in for this, as a huge Futurama fan, although the Bender’s Game movie was pretty lackluster. I’m not sure how rich the vein for comedy is here that hasn’t been mined already, and I’m skeptical of trying to reproduce the chemistry of the main Futurama trio so directly.
I’m worried it will feel like a Family Guy / American Dad situation, which Simpsons / Futurama avoided by having a very different dynamic within the main character “family”. That being said, I think Groening is generally more talented than MacFarlane, so I have some confidence, but how much of Futurama’s success was Groening and how much was the other producers (David X Cohen, et al.)?
I wouldn’t blame the fantasy setting too much for that. The writing for Futurama after the revival was just lackluster overall until basically the last two seasons on Comedy Central.
