Futurama Season 11 Doesn’t Miss a Beat After a Decade Away

Sweet Zombie Jesus! Has any television series retroactively lived up to its premise as accurately as Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s Futurama? Over the span of 24-years, the animated series has been canceled twice, by two separate networks, only to be thawed back to life for three separate revivals. The latest network hero is Hulu, which ordered two brand-new seasons of Futurama and reunited the behind-the-scenes creatives with the original voice cast to skewer humanity 10-years after the last original episode aired in 2013. To paraphrase Bender: “Bite my shiny metal ass, cancellation!”

If you missed the existing 140 episodes produced, the short history is Futurama was Groening’s second animated series created for FOX. It debuted on March 28, 1999 and allowed its creators to riff on tech, science, and the stupidity of man via the lens of Philip J. Fry (Billy West), a dopey pizza guy from 1999 who is cryogenically frozen for 1,000 years and revived on December 31, 2999. A boy-man adrift, Fry connects with his only descendent, the brilliant but perpetually befuddled, Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (also voiced by West), and becomes a delivery boy working for the family business, Planet Express Inc. 

The last original episode of the series, “Meanwhile,” aired on September 4, 2013, and featured Fry trying to propose to his Planet Express co-worker and too-good-for-him girlfriend, Leela (Katey Sagal). But he ruins it by accidentally using Farnsworth’s time button invention which breaks the universe. As the only two people not frozen in time, Fry and Leela live a lifetime together in bliss until Farnsworth arrives with a fix that allows them to go back to their lives… and they do.

Season 11, Episode 1, “The Impossible Stream,” picks up immediately with the Planet Express crew waking up from that ordeal in now 3023. Instead of panic, they react to the time jump with a series-typical shrug and get on with it as Fry decides he needs to find purpose in life. And that, for him, is binge watching every television series ever created on the Fulu streaming service. 

The Futurama writers have had a whole decade of tomfoolery in the tech sector to deservedly skewer, and this season is packed with brutally hilarious takedowns and observations of what humanity has stupidly embraced. In “How the West was 1010001,” the gang heads to Crypto Country and Doge City to bitcoin mine Fransworth out of debt. Leela dryly observes that “Bitcon is a pyramid scheme for rubes,” and then the episode proceeds to rip the whole crypto currency boom as the idiotic and environmentally ignorant enterprise that it is. 

Amazon also gets its own “shots fired” in “Related to Items You’ve Viewed,” which reveals the series’ evil corporate entity, MomCorp, has evolved into the unstoppable, automated retail behemoth, Momazon. Using household speakers called Invasas, Mom (the still incredible Tress MacNeille) has infiltrated every home, and has a moon-based warehouse full of 24/7 working robots to fulfill never-ending drone deliveries. As we experience today’s “Hot Labor Summer,” Futurama proves, as ever, that it’s always been finely attuned to the places where science, technology, and humanity intersect to reveal ultimate absurdity. 

For long-time Futurama fans, the six episodes provided for review feature the return of many of the show’s most beloved cameo characters (as voiced by the still-perfect cast) including Calculon, Roberto, the Robot Mafia, Hedonismbot, and more. Plus, recurring characters like Leela’s pet Nibbler, Robot Santa Claus, and Kiff, Amy Wong’s paramore, get whole episodes built around them. Smartly, the writers mine their very deep bench of characters in clever ways to contemporize their stories while also drawing on their histories in the mythology for nostalgic laughs. It makes the season especially rewarding for the loyal fans, but just as laugh-out-loud funny for any newbies. 

Every single episode is a winner. Genuinely, there are no duds in the bunch. If you’re a sci-fi nerd like me, the best is arguably “Parasites Regained,” the aforementioned Nibbler episode that ends up being a parody of Frank Herbert’s Dune (in all its iterations) and the dewormer medicine, Ivermectin. The dialogue, which is so egg-head smart and stupid at the same time, made me laugh so hard I had to pause the episode to compose myself. Also, keep your ears piqued for some fun voice cameos in this one especially. 

So, “Good news, everyone!” Futurama hasn’t lost a beat after 10-years in television stasis. Its mix of science-smarts, satire, and genuine heart has remained beautifully intact and all we can do is thank the undying fandom and the soulless, money-grubbing TV gods for one more season to come. 

Futurama premieres July 24th, with new episodes airing weekly. 

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen

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