“Good News, Everyone!” Josh Reviews The Return of Futurama!

In an incredible turn of events, Futurama has returned from the dead — YET AGAIN!! — this time on Hulu, returning for a wonderful eleventh season consisting of ten all-new episodes.  It makes me so happy that the show has once again found a way to continue.  The show aired four original seasons on Fox between 1999 and 2003.  It was poorly treated and eventually cancelled on Fox, but resurrected in reruns on Comedy Central.  The popularity of those re-runs led to the creation of four direct-to-DVD feature-length movies (each the length of four original episodes).  The success of those led to the show’s eventual return to TV, in four seasons of 13 episodes that aired on Comedy Central from 2010-2013.  Then the show was cancelled again, but it returned as a crossover episode on The Simpsons in 2014 (called “Simpsorama”), and then as a one-off audio podcast version of a new episode in 2017.

And now, at last, the show has returned, yet again, to TV, with ten new episodes on Hulu (the first half of a twenty-episode order)!  Huzzah!!  It’s a pleasure having new Futurama episodes!!!

I was a fan of Futurama ever since Matt Groening’s sci-fi comedy show premiered back in 1999, but it was an early moment in the second season that made me a forever fan.  In an episode exploring Leela’s backstory, the show journeyed into the lair of the mutants who live underneath the show’s main setting of “New New York” in the year 3000.  I nearly fell off my seat when the show blessed me with a Beneath the Planet of the Apes joke, in which we see a group of mutants worshipping an unexploded nuclear bomb (though one mutant comments that “it’s just a Christmas and Easter thing”).  A prime-time show giving precious seconds to a Beneath the Planet of the Apes joke would be beloved by me forever!!

As Futurama continued, I loved it more and more.  Just as The Simpsons had done, the show developed a wonderfully rich universe of supporting characters and running jokes.  But unlike The Simpsons, the characters on Futurama grew and developed and story-lines and character-arcs (such as the Fry-Leela romance) gradually developed, and certain deep-seeded mysteries in the show (such as Leela’s true history, or the origin of the guys with tinfoil hats often seen in the background) were slowly revealed.  Most of all, the show was consistently as clever and funny as anything else on television.  I loved it, and the show holds up incredibly well when re-watched today.

It’s not easy to bring a TV show back to life after a long pause.  Futurama has been off the air for ten years!!  As we’ve all seen in the last few years, reboots/relaunches of once-popular TV shows fail far more than they succeed.  And so it is a double miracle that these ten new episodes of Futurama feel wonderfully perfect.  It’s as if no time has passed.  This is an incredible achievement.

There were some speed-bumps along the way.  It seems the studio low-balled the voice cast with their offers to return, resulting in Bender actor John DiMaggio’s holding out for months about participating.  I’m glad that was finally resolved (though bummed that it sounds like the studio didn’t wind up dramatically raising their salary offers to the cast) and that the full cast returned for this new season.  I thought the animation in the first new episode was a little wobbly; some of the character motions seemed a bit off to me.  But the show quickly settled down to my eye, and overall I thought the show looked and felt exactly like the Futurama I remembered.

These ten new episodes are all enjoyable.  They’re all great new stories.  (And I love the tweaked opening credits, in which the spinning letters of the show’s title briefly read Hulurama!)

The first episode picks up where the previous series/season finale had left off.  (That episode, “Meanwhile”, is one of the best, sweetest episodes of the show, as Fry and Leela wind up living a lifetime together, between the seconds of the rest of the universe, for whom time is frozen.)  I’m glad the show chose to take the time to address the loose ends left from that episode, before shifting gear into a new zany installment (which, after those first few minutes, is a stand-alone new adventure, in which Fry decides to try to binge every TV show ever made).

I was pleased we got to check back in with the Amy-Kif romance in “Children of a Lesser Bog”, when the two decide to have children.  (That episode, though, provided a rare bit of continuity confusion for me in a show that is usually meticulous in its attention to detail.  There’s a reference to the couple returning to the swamp where they were married 16 years earlier.  But this season feels like it takes place immediately after the end of the previous season, which means only a few years should have passed for the characters.  I guess the line was intended to be a joke about the show’s having been cancelled for a decade, but it set my head spinning, asking questions about how much in-universe time was supposed to have passed!)

Episode four, “Parasites Regained” is a brilliant Dune parody that made me very happy.  It’s also a surprising sequel to the season 3 episode “Parasites Lost”, in which Fry was infected by sentient parasitic worms.  (That’s a heck of a call-back to an episode from twenty years ago!)

I was thrilled to see the evil Mom back in episode five, “Related to Items You’ve Viewed” (which is a brilliant title for an episode), in which her “Momazon” company comes perilously close to attaining complete control of all human civilization.

Another classic Futurama character returned in episode six, “I Know What You Did Next X-Mas”, a time-traveling story involving the murderous robotic Santa Claus.

Episode seven, “Rage Against the Vaccine” (another great episode title) was a timely look at the Covid pandemic and all the fighting about masks and other Covid protocols.  Episode eight, “Zapp Gets Cancelled”, was another timely installment, as the sexist space-captain Zapp Branigan finally gets a (small amount of) comeuppance for all of his bad behavior.

Many previous seasons of Futurama have concluded with an episode telling three out-of-continuity vignettes, linked by a theme.  Episode nine of this season continued that tradition, as we see three stories in which the Futurama gang are depicted as toys: wind-up toys (“windos”), hot-wheels cars, and rubber duckies.  This is an exceedingly bizarre episode (particularly the crazy hot-wheels cars vignette, in which a vengeful Dr. Zoidberg car sets out to murder all of his friends!!), but I enjoyed its craziness and was glad this anthology show Futurama tradition continued.

The season wrapped up strongly with the mind-bending “All the Way Down,” in which the Professor creates a simulation of the entire universe and everyone in-it… and then the Professor in that universe creates another simulation of that universe…  Futurama has often been unafraid to get deep, and this was an interesting (and still very funny!) look at the possibility that our own existence might be a simulation…

I’m overjoyed that Futurama has returned to life with these new episodes!!  This new season was terrific, and I really hope we’ll get lots more to come on Hulu…!!  Here’s hoping.

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