Good news everyone! It’s been ten whole years since Matt Groening’s sci-fi series Futurama was last on our screens – but now it’s back, resurrected (much to the joy of fans) as a Disney+ series with almost all of the old cast.
Telling the story of Fry, a kid from the Nineties who was transported forward in time to the year 3000, the show won awards and a devoted fanbase for its wacky, inventive storytelling – before, of course, being cancelled in 2013.
Not that this is Futurama’s first cancellation rodeo. The original series was first retired in 2003 before being rebooted on Comedy Central in 2008; when it came back, it seized every opportunity to stick the knife into its old network, Fox.
This time around, the wink-tipping is just as heavy. The opening sequences feature knowing subtitles like ‘Just popped out for lunch, did we miss anything?’ to emphasise how long it’s been. In similar vein, the new series starts right at the moment the last one finished.
For those as rusty of brain as Bender, that would be when Fry and Leela — trapped in a time loop for tens of years – were finally saved by the elderly Professor Farnsworth (sounding even more elderly this time around). In Futurama’s last episode back in 2013, he ripped a hole in the space/time continuum to save the pair, returning them to their younger selves. Look, it’s not supposed to make sense; the main thing is that everybody is back.
“It feels like we got rebooted,” Hermes says as the show returns, and then we’re immediately away. In the first few episodes alone, we get a (perhaps unintentional) commentary on the writer’s strikes; Amy and Kif become parents (something that was teased all the way back in the original show), and even Black Mirror gets namechecked via a reboot of the TV show The Scary Door (now The Scary Screen).
Futurama also wastes no time in parading the show’s vibrant cast of characters – by far the best thing about it – under our noses. We‘re reintroduced to everybody from Calculon to the Robot Devil. Hypnotoad gets a look-in, as does Slurm, the toxic energy drink that Fry loves so much. Even the Robot Mafia manage to peer menacingly through the door, reminding us what it is we loved so much about Futurama in the first place.
There are some moments when it shows its age. Fry’s Nineties dumb-guy schtick feels much less relatable than it used to, more than two decades after Y2K; characters like Hermes or Amy’s parents Leo and Inez, with their thick, slightly caricatured accents, are wince-inducing. Plus, it’s hard to believe that Leela was once touted as an icon of feminism. A few roundhouse kicks does not a social justice warrior make: here, she mostly wails and complains.
And… it’s missing something. The original series was so brilliant because it combined stupid of humour with genuine emotional beats. In the six episodes I was given for review, that same humour was there, but the emotions fell a bit flat. Why should we care that Amy and Kif are struggling with parenthood? Plus, are Fry and Leela even in a relationship, or not? That’s never really addressed at all.
Fortunately, there is still satire. Episode one is a sharp-nibbed look at modern-day TV streaming and how easily shows get cancelled; episode three mercilessly mocks Bitcoin-miners (though in all fairness, this does feel about five years too late) and Amazon also gets a kicking via futuristic corporation Momazon – yes, she’s back too.
At its best, the series is as fun as it always was: a riot of inventiveness and fart jokes, crammed right into your eyeballs. Though there are sticking points, let’s hope they’re just teething troubles: pour yourself a big glass of Slurm and enjoy. I’m still all in.
