“Future Man” arrived on Hulu on November 14, 2017, with a premise built for a very specific kind of viewer: a janitor who is also a world-ranked gamer, recruited by two visitors from the future to stop the extinction of humanity. It ran for three seasons and 34 episodes, ending on April 3, 2020. Then, in May 2023, it was removed from all Disney streaming services, including Hulu and Disney+, due to Disney’s budget cuts. A show about a man nobody takes seriously, quietly erased from the platforms that carried it.
That is the shape of “Future Man.” A comic science fiction sitcom created by Howard Overman, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, executive produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and starring Josh Hutcherson in the lead. It is loud, crude, and frequently smarter than it lets on. It is also uneven in ways that keep it from the top tier. It lands at 7.0/10.
Trailer, via ONE Media.
Josh Futturman and the Game He Should Not Have Beaten
The premise is the engine. Josh Futturman is an aimless janitor. His life is nondescript. His sole hobby is playing video games, specifically “Biotic Wars,” a game considered unbeatable.
He beats it. After many attempts, he completes the game. Then the game’s two main characters, Tiger and Wolf, appear in the real world and recruit him to save the world from the real Biotic Wars. Josh and his companions travel through time to change the future.
That is a clean hook, and the show knows it. The joke underneath is that Josh is not a hero. He is a guy who was good at a video game and got mistaken for a prophecy. The series takes that mistake seriously enough to build a plot on it, and silly enough to never let Josh forget he is a janitor.
Hutcherson plays Josh. Eliza Coupe plays Tiger. Derek Wilson plays Wolf. Ed Begley Jr. and Glenne Headly play Josh’s parents. Seth Rogen and Haley Joel Osment appear in recurring roles.
Tiger, Wolf and the Cast Around Hutcherson
The casting was assembled fast and early. Hutcherson was announced in the lead role on February 17, 2016. A week later, Eliza Coupe was reported in a main role. On March 7, 2016, Glenne Headly and Ed Begley Jr. joined as Josh’s parents. On May 2, 2016, Derek Wilson joined in a main role.
The recurring bench filled out over the next two years:
- Patrick Carlyle and Robert Craighead, cast in April 2017
- Shaun Brown, announced June 28, 2018
- Sara Amini and Rati Gupta, reported July 17, 2018
- Tim Johnson Jr., Jade Catta-Preta and Timothy Hornor, announced August 2018
That is a deep bench for a show whose weight rests on three performances. Coupe and Wilson are the ones who matter. Tiger and Wolf are the future’s answer to Josh, and the show’s best running tension is that they treat him as a chosen one while treating each other as a liability. Coupe plays Tiger as a soldier with no patience for the past. Wilson plays Wolf as a soldier with too much appetite for it. Both are funnier than the scripts sometimes deserve.
Time Travel as a Comedy Machine
“Future Man” uses time travel the way a sitcom uses a living room: as a place to put people who should not be in the same room.
Josh, Tiger and Wolf move through time to change the future. That structure lets the show reset its setting whenever the joke runs dry, and it lets the writers drop three people with no social skills into periods that punish them for it. The show is classified as Comedy and Sci-Fi & Fantasy, and it earns both labels. The science fiction is not decorative. The plot turns on the real Biotic Wars, the invasion Josh was recruited to prevent, and the show keeps that threat in view even when it is being gross.
In my reading, the weakness is the same as the strength. A show that can go anywhere can also go nowhere. Three seasons and 34 episodes is a reasonable length, and the final season closed the story on April 3, 2020. But the middle of the run leans on shock and volume more than it leans on the premise. When “Future Man” is good, it is a machine. When it is not, it is three people yelling in a hallway.
The 7.0/10 and What It Measures
“Future Man” holds a published critical score of 7.0/10, with a Metacritic score of 70 out of 100. That is the right neighborhood. This is a show with a real idea, a real lead performance, and a real ceiling.
The score reflects a show that is easy to recommend and hard to defend as great. It does not have the precision of the best genre comedies. It has something else: commitment. The show treats its premise as the real thing rather than a winking joke. It does not, as far as the record shows, pull the rug out and announce that the game was a metaphor. It says the game was real, the invasion is real, and the janitor is the key.
That commitment is why the casting of Hutcherson matters. He was announced in the pilot’s lead role in February 2016, before the show had a title anyone knew. He plays Josh as a man who is genuinely confused to be here, and that confusion is the show’s most reliable fuel.
The Removal From Hulu and Disney+
In May 2023, “Future Man” was removed from all Disney streaming services, including Hulu and Disney+, due to Disney’s budget cuts. The show premiered on Hulu on November 14, 2017. It ended on April 3, 2020. Three years later, it was gone from the platforms that carried it.
That is not a creative decision. It is a business one. But it changes how the show reads. A series about a man the future needs but the present ignores now has a second life as a series the present ignored. The source gives one reason for the removal: Disney’s budget cuts. Nothing more specific is on the record.
For viewers, the practical effect is simple: the show is harder to find than it was. For the show’s reputation, the effect is harder to read. A title that disappears from its own platform tends to get remembered as a footnote, not a recommendation.
An aimless janitor, Josh Futturman, leads a nondescript life.
That is the first line of the premise, and it is the whole show in one sentence.
Where the Show Actually Lands
The case for “Future Man” is the case for a sitcom that took a silly idea and built a real plot on top of it. Josh beats an unbeatable game. Two characters from that game show up. They tell him he is the key to defeating the imminent super-race invasion. He goes with them.
Everything the show does well flows from that. Everything it does badly flows from the same place. The premise is strong enough to carry three seasons. It is not strong enough to carry every episode of them.
The case against is the middle. “Future Man” is a show that can travel anywhere, and it uses that freedom to avoid the discipline that makes the best genre comedy work. The result is a series with high peaks and long flat stretches, which is exactly what a 7.0/10 describes.
What matters most here is not the score. It is the removal. A show that ran for three seasons, closed its story, and then got pulled from Hulu and Disney+ in May 2023 is a show that has to be found rather than stumbled onto. That is the part worth watching. The show itself is good, sometimes very good, and rarely as good as its best idea.
What the Score Leaves Out
“Future Man” is worth the time. It is a comic science fiction sitcom with a clean hook, a committed lead in Josh Hutcherson, and two supporting performances in Eliza Coupe and Derek Wilson that do more work than the scripts sometimes ask of them. It ran from November 14, 2017 to April 3, 2020, across three seasons and 34 episodes. It holds a published critical score of 7.0/10, with a Metacritic score of 70 out of 100.
That is the number. It is not a knock. A 7.0/10 is a show that does its job and occasionally exceeds it. “Future Man” does its job. It takes a janitor who beat an unbeatable game and makes him the key to stopping the real Biotic Wars, and it never once treats that as a joke it is embarrassed by. That is rarer than it sounds.
The removal from Disney’s streaming services in May 2023 is the part that will define its afterlife, and it should not. The show is better than its availability suggests. It is also not better than a 7.0/10. Both things are true, and the score is the honest one.
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