At last, we have the answer to the question, “What happens when a beloved animated series gets cancelled (again) and is revived 10 years later?” And the answer, in the case of Futurama, whose last new episodes aired during the Obama presidency, is you get 10 episodes that feel like Futurama, look like Futurama, but mostly lack the spark the show originally had.
And I can’t help but wonder why it turned out this way. While 10 years is a long hiatus, it’s also plenty of time to work on new and clever stories, with solid writing and jokes. Instead, most of the new episodes were mildly amusing, often just weird and didn’t leave me yearning for more.
First, the good news (everyone):
- All the voice actors are back. I felt Billy West (Fry, Farnsworth and Zoidberg) and Katey Sagal (Leela) sounded a bit off in the first episode, but were mostly fine after that. For West, it seemed more like he just wasn’t used to doing the voices again (admittedly, none of the cast members are exactly young anymore), where with Sagal it felt more like she was sometimes struggling to recapture the character, something compounded by generally weak or uninspired writing and possibly direction that may have deferred to the actors, giving them freer reign (I have not read anything about the production, so I could be way off base here).
- The episode introducing Kif and Amy’s kids was probably the best of the season and, tellingly, character-focused. It expanded the show’s storytelling while keeping the full Slurmy flavor of Futurama.
- Continuity remains excellent. The show has picked up without missing a beat three times now. The first episode of Season 11 literally starts right after the end of the last episode of Season 10.
- The Momazon episode was pretty decent.
The not good news:
- The writing was generally limp. A lot of the episodes just weren’t that funny. It seemed like the writers in particular didn’t know how to treat Leela. A lot of it just fell back to old stuff, while adding nothing new.
- I think they may have done their worst episode yet: Episode 9, where the characters are shown as toys, was weird, unfunny, and the framing story was kind of dumb.
- The final episode, written by co-developer David Cohen, held promise with a high concept: the gang question whether they might be in a vast computer simulation. But it then gets bogged down in a lot of technobabble and mostly forgets to be funny.
- The attempts to riff on contemporary topics, which the show has done successfully before, almost universally fizzled. The pandemic episode was something that could have been clever, but it went nowhere. People coughed and acted violent. None of it was especially funny, or even interesting. Except for the Momazon episode mentioned above, all of these attempts really didn’t click.
I am a bit baffled that the episodes were so mediocre. Maybe 10 years off is too long. I read that three more seasons (presumably 30 episodes) have been ordered, and I think they can still turn the (Planet Express) ship around, but only if they examine what they failed to achieve in an unremarkable Season 11. Or, you know, just hire better writers.
