3003 All Over Again
Bender is an alcoholic robot who will steal your wallet and feel entirely justified about it. Fry is a delivery boy from 1999 who got cryogenically frozen by accident and woke up a thousand years later, no better for the experience. Leela has one eye and more personal dignity than anyone else in the room. Futurama was always the better Groening show—denser, weirder, and funnier than anything the Simpsons family has managed in fifteen years—and Fox cancelling it in 2003 after four seasons because the ratings were soft remains one of television’s more embarrassing decisions.
Comedy Central bought the rights and starts airing new episodes this week. Seven years of reruns cycling through the same episodes is finally over. I’ve watched Jurassic Bark enough times to know exactly which frame will break me, which is a strange and specific kind of intimacy to have with an animated dog.
The science fiction frame gave the writers room The Simpsons never had: genuine tragedy, actual stakes, time paradoxes that somehow still hurt. The emotional gut-punches landed harder because you didn’t expect them from a cartoon about a slacker in a spacesuit. Matt Groening’s chaotic future—Planet Express, Mom’s Friendly Robot Company, the suicide booths on every corner—had more formal invention in a single episode than most sitcoms manage across an entire season.
New episodes start now. Welcome back to the future.