Futurama has been cancelled and revived across four different outlets
Matt Groening's cartoon about a pizza boy frozen for a thousand years keeps refusing to stay dead. Fox dropped it, Adult Swim reran it, Comedy Central brought it back twice, and Hulu revived it again in 2022. New episodes resumed in August 2026, with three longer specials promised for 2027.
Groening dreamed up the show in the mid-1990s while still working on The Simpsons, and recruited Simpsons writer David X. Cohen to build characters and plots for a pitch to Fox. The premise is simple: Philip J. Fry falls into a cryogenic pod just after midnight on 1 January 2000 and wakes on 31 December 2999. He takes a delivery job at Planet Express, a firm owned by his only surviving relative, the ancient Professor Farnsworth, and crews a ship with the one-eyed captain Leela and a robot named Bender.
At heart it is a workplace sitcom, but the setting lets writers exaggerate modern troubles. New New York sits on top of the ruins of the old city, which now serves as a sewer where mutants live. Global warming, bureaucracy and addiction all come back larger. A favourite device is the Head Museum, where celebrities survive as heads in jars, which let the show mock real public figures. Richard Nixon, who died in 1994, turns up again and again even though he died long before such technology could have existed.
The jokes run deep. Leela's name nods to Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila symphony. Bender was built to bend girders, yet ends up as the ship's cook with no sense of taste, and he needs alcohol to charge his fuel cells.
After Fox's cancellation, reruns on Adult Swim lasted from 2003 to 2007. Four direct-to-video films followed from 2007, later cut into 16 half-hour episodes for Comedy Central, which in June 2009 ordered 26 more. Hulu announced a twenty-episode order on 9 February 2022 and another twenty in November 2023. Along the way the series won nine of its 17 Annie nominations and six of 12 Emmy nominations.
Source: Futurama
