>>122354042>>122355150I'd say half the fun of doing a show set in the future is being able to call over to real world politics. The problem is that it's often done incompetently when it doesn't have to be, usually because the writers don't actually have much insightful commentary *or* they forget that they're also writing for a specific show, so they write "a politics episode" rather than "an episode of the show that happens to deal with politics"
Think of the episode where Earth is about to be hit by the giant ball of trash. That's very obviously calling over to the real world politics of waste management, but it doesn't beat you over the head with some stupid didactic message about how you should recycle. It's mostly a vehicle for jokes, even if there's also some obvious commentary going on.
If I had to square the circle of dealing with current culture-war politics around transgenderism in Futurama I'd try to avoid doing an entire episode. Just put in a throwaway joke about how people haven't cared about transgenderism in hundreds of years - now people doing experimental species-change surgeries, *they* are lower than vermin... especially the trans-rats.
