Futurama is about to be brought back to television for the second time, continuing to defy the odds of television. It’s very rare for a show to come back once, let alone twice, so Hulu’s upcoming revival plans give the show a chance to learn from its past mistakes — specifically from its previous resurrection on Comedy Central from 2008-2013. The Hulu revival, while it may not include one important cast member, has the opportunity to improve upon what happened before.
After Futurama’s original cancellation on Fox, the animated series’s reruns gained massive popularity as part of the Adult Swim lineup of adult animation on Cartoon Network. That success led to the production of four direct-to-video movies, which would later be edited down into a 16-episode stretch eventually recognized as Season 5. Comedy Central would revive the series for an official Season 6, producing two 26-episode cycles before ending the show once again with the bittersweet but utterly romantic finale “Meanwhile.”
Season 6 was a return to the status quo, reestablishing Futurama with some basics of the world in a short time while also focusing on more topical subjects. The problem is that as a result, the show produced some of its more lackluster episodes in this period. The Season 6 premiere “Rebirth” returned the terribly underrated Planet Express crew to Earth following the epic finale of Season 5, “Into the Wild Green Yonder.” But many of the little advancements in terms of character relationships and the world that were established in Futurama‘s mini-movie arcs were reversed or outright ignored.
While earlier seasons of Futurama used the setting to tell surprisingly timeless explorations of different genres and sci-fi concepts, Season 6 became more focused on topical issues. This included installments dedicated to the spread of smartphones (“Attack of the Killer App”), the debate over gay marriage in the United States (“Proposition Infinity”), and parodying then-mainstream hits like The Da Vinci Code (“The Duh-Vinci Code”) or Yo Gabba Gabba (“Yo Leela Leela”). While there were still some strong examples of Futurama‘s classic character-heavy sci-fi comedy to be found — such as the genuinely touching “Lethal Inspection” and “The Late Phillip J. Fry” — many episodes from Season 6 are among the smost forgettable because they became irrevocably tied to that period in culture.
As a result of their specific references, the episodes quickly became dated in a way most of the classic episodes of the futuristic comedy never did. When the show returned to more specific genre parodies and character-heavy storylines, the quality of the episodes improved and fans got back the Futurama they knew, loved and had rallied behind.
The Hulu revival should learn from the Comedy Central experience, and avoid simply returning to the status quo to deliver culturally dependent storylines that lose their touch after a few years. Instead, the show should look at the self-contained arcs of Season 5, the character highlights of Season 6, and the eventual return to full sci-fi-comedy/philosophical exploration in the strong Season 7 as inspiration for its new episodes.
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