Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Futurama.
About a year ago, I took a look at Futurama’s eighth (or eleventh, depending on how we count things) season. I said in my review that a few episodes managed to win a chuckle here and there, but none were outstanding. This revived edition of Futurama still had a lot of work to do to justify its resurrection – something that was born in one of Disney’s corporate offices as executives scrounged around, desperate for content to add to Disney+ and hoping to successfully play the nostalgia card.
Futurama Season 9/12 is in the same vein – but less funny. In fact, I think I could count on one hand the number of times I laughed across the entire ten-episode season, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of what was once TV’s premiere sci-fi comedy series. Futurama has lost a step, and while it’s far from the only revived or rebooted show to fail at recapturing the magic… that doesn’t make me feel any better!
Here’s the headline: I can’t say I hated any of the ten episodes this season. There were some moments of cringe humour – the kind that I personally can’t stand – and a couple of episodes that had clearly taken so long to produce that they felt way out of date. But despite the fact that I didn’t really find much of it to be all that funny, these episodes passed by inoffensively enough. They’d probably make for decently okay background viewing – the kind of thing I switch on while I’m distracted doing something else. There’s not a lot of content or story to get stuck into in really any of the episodes. This season is like the television equivalent of fast food; something to watch, but lacking in any real substance.
So while I’d definitely watch this batch of episodes again, it wouldn’t really be by choice. If I felt sufficiently bored and needed some background noise, they’d be fine for that purpose! But is that what fans want from Futurama? Is the series – which, in its prime, was one of the cleverest sci-fi shows around, and one of the funniest comedies, too – really just being relegated to this… slop? As corporations race to add ever more content to streaming platforms in a bid to retain subscribers, shows like Futurama are being butchered, turned into corporate-mandated fluff that executives can boast about to shareholders in their annual meetings. “Did you see how many fans came back to Disney+ for Futurama? That means we made a net gain of subscribers this quarter!” That’s why Futurama is back. And it shows.
I’d argue that this season fundamentally misunderstands not only what made the original Futurama so entertaining, but what a revived series should aim to be. This was a chance to tell new stories with characters fans came to know and love, but instead Futurama’s writers – almost certainly at Disney’s insistence – are trying to re-do the show’s “greatest hits.” Plot points are recycled, random characters from earlier episodes make cameos for no good reason, and even jokes are re-told in less funny, less entertaining ways. These last two seasons of Futurama should be a case study in how to completely misunderstand and overrate the importance of nostalgia as a driving force in entertainment.
As an example, the ship’s can opener – which causes Bender to sing uncontrollably and mangled him in the third season episode Bendin’ In The Wind – made a return… but not in any real way. A joke was made about Bender singing, another about the can opener being given its own quarters… but that was all. It was a reference to a funnier, stronger, and all-around better episode for no other reason than to say “hey guys, remember how good Futurama used to be?”
Image Credit: Abrams Books/The Hollywood Reporter
And this didn’t just happen with jokes. A flashback to a young Hermes playing with blocks in the aftermath of a hurricane was a callback to How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back, only without any of the fun or emotional impact. Bender’s second trip to Mexico likewise lacked any of the charm of his first, and even flashbacks to Fry’s family in the 20th Century felt like little more than the show trying and failing to recapture the magic of better episodes.
All of these in-jokes, meta-humour, and self-referential moments came across less as fun little easter eggs for returning fans and more as callbacks to when the show was actually good. This is what I mean when I say the season overplayed its hand; little jokes and references here and there can, under the right circumstances, be fun, and fan service is not inherently a bad idea. But Futurama totally missed the mark on this occasion.
I can’t help but feel that Futurama is taking the wrong lessons from the likes of Rick and Morty. Having originally inspired a whole new generation of sci-fi animated comedies, Futurama is now in the awkward position of trying to take storytelling styles and narrative concepts from them. Rick and Morty regularly breaks the fourth wall, references itself, and creates these meta-narratives that are funny – but messy. Futurama didn’t fully commit to that style, but this season tried to steal some of the trappings with almost no success.
Futurama doesn’t get the same leeway as the likes of Rick and Morty, which uses more violence, more sexual content, swearing, and so on. In that sense, Futurama feels more tame – but rather than lean into that, the show’s writers want their show to feel more “edgy.” But without being able to go further – perhaps constrained by Disney in a way that Rick and Morty isn’t – it just comes across as half-hearted… or half-arsed. The same is true of the show’s meta-jokes and self-referential humour: without being able to fully commit to being that style of show, Futurama can’t employ those moments effectively.
The series is in real danger of losing its identity. Futurama is unable to keep up with newer shows in the sci-fi animated space – shows that it inspired and that wouldn’t exist without it. It’s unable to fully emulate or copy them – and doing so would erase everything that makes Futurama feel like Futurama. But in an entertainment landscape that has changed massively in the quarter of a century since it debuted, Futurama can’t effectively do the same things it used to. Its attempt to mix a sci-fi setting with real-world parallels falls flat. Its episodic storytelling with character growth has plateaued and seemingly has nowhere left to go. Even its trademark mix of laugh-out-loud jokes with emotional moments that literally left fans in tears isn’t working any more. The jokes aren’t funny and the attempts at emotional storytelling feel thoroughly un-earned.
This is usually the part where I’d say something like this: “if the jokes and emotion landed for you, that’s great!” But I don’t think there are many Futurama fans in that camp. These two recent seasons feel so corporate and hollowed-out, so devoid of everything that made the original work feel special, and so utterly, irredeemably bland… that I really don’t know if anyone is loving Futurama any more. I think a lot of people will watch it and tolerate it – aside from a dated episode about NFTs and some jokes that were too cringe for my taste, there’s not much unpleasant about this season of Futurama. It goes down easy, as they say. But actually watching this season to enjoy what’s on offer? Is anyone out there doing that?
Alright, let’s go through the episodes briefly and talk about which (if any) might graze the high bar of “yeah, I guess that one was okay.”
The One Amigo is a horribly outdated story about NFTs – the market for which tanked a solid two years before its July 2024 broadcast. Bender returning to Mexico felt like a significantly worse version of Lethal Inspection. That episode had genuine stakes, a great emotional core, and a twist. This one has Bender meeting a bunch of random Mexican stereotypes and no real ending. Seriously… Bender was “sacrificed” then, one scene later, was back at home just in time for the credits.
Up next was Quid’s Game, which honestly was just middle-of-the-road fluff. None of the characters ever felt like they were in danger, the flashbacks to Fry’s family were okay but didn’t really deliver much in terms of story or emotional weight. The twist – that Fry’s mother was secretly rigging the games so he’d win – was pretty obvious, and the return of Gedgie (from Season 6’s Cold Warriors) wasn’t particularly interesting, either.
The Temp called back to the episode Amazon Women in the Mood, setting part of its story in the aftermath of that episode. Though timelines aren’t something to be terribly concerned about in a show like Futurama, it was a little odd that The Temp repeatedly called attention to the twenty-three year time span. When characters don’t seem to age and the show appears to be mostly episodic with a floating timeline, it’s just a bit of a strange thing to bring up. The Temp was mostly okay, though, and the idea of a very forgettable person being accidentally abandoned was interesting.
Ah yes, a timely and delicate critique of bullfighting – that’s what Futurama needs. Or so the writers of Beauty and the Bug believed. We get it: bullfighting is outdated and cruel. But this episode added nothing to that conversation that hasn’t already been said, and it muddled its messaging with Bender’s quest to become a champion bug-fighter taking up much of the middle of the story. There wasn’t much nuance… and I just don’t see the point of a story like this.
AI chat bots have been in the news a lot – so one side of One Is Silicon, The Other Is Gold seemed pretty timely. But that Fyre Festival parody at the beginning? I mean, that was way too late to be biting and funny! Still, once the episode got going the idea of Leela falling prey to a chat bot was interesting, and the boys’ book club was surprisingly cute.
Attack of the Clothes annoyed me because it seemed to end on a cliffhanger… only for its story to disappear, never to be mentioned again. The world of “fast fashion” is, I will admit, not something I’m especially familiar with. But a story about not immediately disposing of things after one use could make sense. Attack of the Clothes, though, just felt like a vehicle for guest star Cara Delevigne. Some recent episodes of The Simpsons can be way too deferential to their guest stars, sucking up to them and showering them with compliments. Attack of the Clothes felt like that, at least in part. Is it fair to call it a good story concept ruined by a guest star who was a little too present?
Planet Espresso wasn’t terrible at first, but it had that awful callback that I mentioned above, and also ended on another underwhelming cliffhanger. Are we ever gonna see those coffee aliens again? I doubt it – so why not finish the story in a more solid way? Having never met (nor even heard about) Hermes’ father, there wasn’t a lot for this episode to build on. I think the bare bones of the story had potential, but the emotional moments didn’t really stick the landing for me.
On a couple of occasions, Futurama has used one of these “three-stories-in-one” episodes to show off a range of different storytelling and animation styles. The Futurama Mystery Liberry was this season’s attempt to do that… but the animation was weirdly lacking, at least for me. There was an opportunity to really lean into different visual styles inspired by the comics and illustrations that the stories were drawn from, but that didn’t happen. The stories themselves, being less than ten minutes apiece, were pretty basic, but if you’re familiar with the likes of Nancy Drew and Tintin you’ll at least get most of the references. I thought it was a bit of a waste of guest stars LeVar Burton and Neil deGrasse Tyson, though.
Remember in the ’90s when everyone got obsessed with Beanie Babies? The writers of Cuteness Overlord do… and they thought it was worth making a timely critique of the phenomenon. I mean… do I even have to say it? There were echoes of the NFT episode here, too, which just felt repetitive, Amy seemed to act out of character in order to drive the story, and I just… I just don’t understand why you’d make an episode like this in 2024. In 1999, maybe. But now? The Beanie Baby fad died decades ago and you’d have to be my age or older to even remember it. What was the point?
In keeping with earlier seasons, Otherwise was this season’s attempt to end with an emotional sucker punch. But like last year, we seemed to spend most of our time following a different set of characters – who were all killed off at the end anyway. These parallel universe/alternate timeline stories really don’t have much to say, and given that these events will almost certainly not be brought up again in future… I just don’t feel much of an impact. There were some moments with Fry that came close to expressing the emotion that the episode wanted… but the ending wrenched most of that away.
So that was Futurama’s ninth or twelfth season. It’s hard to say I hated it given how plain and inoffensive most of it was. The worst I can say, really, is that references to things like NFTs and the Fyre Festival came years too late to be relevant – kind of like last season’s covid vaccine story. But on a deeper level, I really feel sad for Futurama. To be turned into this bland content slop just so Disney can play the nostalgia card amidst the “streaming wars”… I dunno. A show that was so influential that it basically created its own sub-genre deserves better than this.
There are two more seasons of Futurama to come – presumably later this year and in 2026. On current form, I don’t really expect to see the series improve significantly. I’d love to be proven wrong, and for the final two seasons to be a genuine return to form. But this revival feels so soulless and like such a misunderstanding of what viewers want and expect that I don’t have high hopes.
Futurama is available to stream now on Disney+. The series is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. Futurama is the copyright of 20th Television Animation, Hulu, and/or The Walt Disney Company. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 