What’s Life Like, 26 Years Into the Fourth Millennium?

Given Futurama‘s notorious history of being repeatedly canceled, it’s strange that the sci-fi sitcom may well be the single most influential adult animated show in terms of how much modern adult animation takes their cues from it. Sure, The Simpsons may have invented the genre and Family Guy may have taken over its mantle of premier zany family sitcom, but the animated sitcom format today is more sci-fi than not, and even in shows with more traditional families like Rick and Morty, it’s the sci-fi that remains the draw.

As Futurama heads into its third Hulu season and its 26^th year overall, it’s a victim of its own success. How does it continue to stay ahead of the competition it has encouraged? Paradoxically, the main advantage for current Futurama is its lack of interest in lore. If you haven’t checked it out for a while, you might be surprised to learn, for example, that Fry, the isekai everyman from before anyone knew what the word isekai meant, is now romantically linked with Leela, the one eyed action girl. Early Futurama never milked the will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic, using Fry’s one-sided affections as another manifestation of his character’s well-meaning everyman incompetence. And the current show doesn’t do much with it either, giving the two a mostly boring relationship. And I mean that as praise.

Fry and Leela’s anxieties are quite petty. They’re introduced in the first episode having a very low stakes continuing argument about whether they’re a good couple because they’re too similar or too different. In another episode Fry fumbles an elaborate sentimental gesture mostly because Leela isn’t interesting in elaborate sentimental gestures. Victim to his own insecurity, Fry seeks answers from a forbidden artifact that uses a too-potent romantic algorithm. Stories like this work because, sci-fi trappings notwithstanding, they caricature our aspirations for artificial intelligence, and its attendant overly complex solutions for generally simple problems.

Not all of this season of Futurama manages to be quite so poignant, in between silly jokes about USB dongles and casual murder. The global warming episode warrants more than a small eyeroll because its preachy jokes, in addition to being obvious, are also repeated way too often when they barely landed the first time. You can’t run a whole premise, and even an episode twist, on the idea that scientists are absent-minded buffoons so caught up on their own esoteric ideas they can’t read the data, and then literally chastise the viewer for not taking scientists seriously enough.

Other strong episodes this season lean more effectively into the idea of brilliant scientists like Professor Farnsworth using their intelligence to justify extremely stupid ideas. A trip to the “number dimension” gets absurdly arcane with obscure mathematical jokes even while managing to toss in the occasional silliness of a technically correct reference to Google. Indeed, this is actually one of the few edges Futurama (in some incarnations anyway) has over other sci-fi sitcoms. A writing staff that understands scientific principles, instead of just riffing on them, will almost always come up with far more dysfunctional, and therefore funny, interpretations of technology than writing staff that just views technology as functionally indistinguishable from magic.

None of this is to oversell the quality of the comedy. Much like the rest of the sitcom genre, there are ideas that obviously sounded funnier in the writer’s room than they do in practice. The sociopathic robot Bender suddenly caring about his height was a pretty lousy opener. Bender becoming a truffle hunter? All right for most of the episode, although you can tell the ending drags because these episodes had to be given commercial break spots so they could play on FXX- a cable channel for which (some) Furutama episodes are now syndicated content. Though unfortunate for this episode, the ad spots are actually pretty good for the pacing — unlike modern streaming-oriented shows, the obvious commercial break cuts in this season function just as well as in earlier shows, allowing the story to linger on dramatic beats.

The episode about screentime is also meh, merely showing that Futurama continues to be weirdly hostile to hippies. The Pizzagate episode is, incredibly, actually one of the better ones, mainly because it takes one of the few Trump comedy angles that haven’t been done to death, and the Trump character is less of a menace as is Bender, indulging the absurd conspiracy just for the petty fun of it. And true to the sitcom format, the script remembers that ridiculous, groundless conspiracies are best undone by well-paced explanations that are more, not less ridiculous.

If there’s any watchword to enjoying Futurama here, it’s to make a point of pacing yourself. Anyone who made a point of watching the episodes nice and slow like that had the good fortune to watch the Rapture episode right as the real-world rapture story started raging. Plus, the season ends on a great high note that warrants savoring — a Mickey 17 concept that does a lot more with the idea than the movie did with a lot less screentime. Plus, of course, it has scenes where Zoidberg devours hundreds of pounds of yogurt.