| Friday, June 12, 2009 |
05:42 - Back to the Futurama
http://www.hitfix.com/articles/2009-6-9-new-futurama-coming-in-2010
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"Good news, everyone!"
Comedy Central has given new life to Matt Groening and David X. Cohen's "Futurama," ordering new episodes of the animated cult favorite.
The cable network announced on Tuesday (June 9) that it has ordered 26 new "Futurama" episodes, a remarkable achievement for a show that hasn't aired an original episode since August of 2003.
Comedy Central acquired rights to the 72 "Futurama" episodes back in 2006 and has been regularly airing the series, which aired as part of FOX's Sunday animation block from 1999 to 2003, since early 2008. The network then moved forward on the extra-long "Futurama" adventures "Bender's Big Score," "The Beast with a Billion Backs," "Bender's Game" and "Into the Wild Green Yonder," which achieved enough success, particularly in DVD sales, to spur Comedy Central and 20th Century Fox TV to action on this new order.
"We are excited to continue our relationship with Matt, David and 20th Century Fox TV and to be able to offer Comedy Central viewers the first opportunity to see new episodes of 'Futurama,'" says David Bernath, senior vice president, programming. "As evidenced by the strong performance of the extended length epics, there remains a deep and passionate fan base for this intelligent and very funny show that matches perfectly with our audience. It's fantastic that we can add brand-new installments of Leela, Fry and Bender's adventures to our existing library."
I was okay with Futurama ending where it did; right at the top of its game, firing on all cylinders, and with the fans all wanting more. That's far preferable to seeing it languish in a suspended-animation (heh) limbo like what The Simpsons has become, trapped under the weight of its canon and its baggage of injokes and character history. Futurama only lasted four seasons, which is plenty to flesh out a universe, but not enough to lard it up with so much backstory you can't tell anything new.
Plus The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings was an outstanding episode to end it on: cameos from characters from all four seasons, witty dialogue thick and heavy, well-choreographed musical sequences with deucedly clever lyrics, an occasion where Fry actually gets to show that he's grown personally over the past four years and is capable of achieving greatness (as opposed to Homer Simpson, who's gotten more and more infantile and impotent as time's gone on)—and an ending sequence hinting that his futile pursuit of Leela all this time might finally bear some honest fruit.
But I don't mind so much if they're going to continue it, either. I'm certainly not going to fight it. It might mean the storyline (non-serial though it is) will have to wrestle with itself in the same way Battlestar Galactica did, having to hurry to pad out a season with filler episodes once it found itself with an unexpected new season's worth of time to kill before the story-arc tie-up it had been zeroing in on. Futurama might be no more graceful at resetting Fry and Leela's romance to sustainable-comic-misadventures level than the Wachowski Brothers were at making two more Matrix movies with tension and conflict after ending the first one with an apparent declaration that Neo was invincible.
Even so. If they're doing this, it means there's hope for humanity yet; it's not just the Family Guy contingent that can compel a restart of a cancelled series' engine on the strength of DVD sales and Internet forums. This time the geeks rule.
"We're thrilled 'Futurama' is coming back," Groening says in the statement. "We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000."
Adds Cohen, "We're excited and amazed that the show is coming back, perhaps due to some sort of mysterious time loop. We look forward to working with Comedy Central and 20th Television to make this the best iteration of the loop yet!"
Just don't do that thing with the dog again. You bastards.
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Brian Tiemann
