It's takes a very good show to be able to make bureaucracy affecting, but Futurama succeeds and then some. In the episode, "Lethal Inspection", Bender discovers that he is, in robot terms, mortal. He was created without the ability to back up his memory, meaning that if his current body was ever destroyed, he too would cease to exist. Despite his faulty hardware, Bender was approved by a mysterious bureaucratic figure called Inspector 5, and enrols fellow pencil-pusher Hermes to help discover the man's identity, so that swift and brutal justice can be reigned upon him. One road trip to Mexico later, Inspector 5 was revealed to be none other than Hermes himself, unbeknownst to Bender. In the past, when he saw the tiny robot roll off the assembly line, though he knew he was defective, Hermes couldn't bring himself to scrap the little metal guy, approving him before resigning his post. The deception of it all makes it a somewhat messy ending, and the almost-too-twee song played over the revealing flashback ('Little Bird, Little Bird' by Elizabeth Mitchell) nearly makes it sickening, but it's a sober glimpse at mortality in a OTT world, and a tender moment extolling the value of living life while you're able.
