Futurama Review

Fox buries it, shuffles it around the schedule, and kills it in 2003, and the show outlives that decision twice over, returning on Comedy Central and again on Hulu. Critics came around slowly and then decisively, and the consensus now treats Futurama as the rare animated comedy with a real science fiction imagination behind the gags, built by a writers room stacked with mathematics and computer science degrees that hides theorems in the background of a bar.

What makes it last is not the robot jokes. It is the willingness to stop being funny. The Luck of the Fryrish and Jurassic Bark still work as short films about loss, and they land because the series spends the rest of its time refusing to be sentimental. Billy West, Katey Sagal and John DiMaggio do voice work that gives Fry, Leela and Bender interior lives no sitcom would bother writing, and the scripts are denser than the cartoon frame suggests.

The weaknesses are structural. Plotting is episodic to a fault, whole seasons pass with nobody changing, and the Fry and Leela romance is reset so often it turns into a joke the writers are not telling on purpose. The revivals are uneven, with the Comedy Central years strong and the later returns leaning on callbacks. The design is handsome, clean line work over restrained computer graphics, but it is television animation and it looks it. Watch it for the writing, which is the best in its form.