Futurama Season 11 Doesn’t Miss a Beat After a Decade Away
Photo Courtesy of Hulu
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.