My reaction is the same as others here … Futurama is still on? Seriously, they must have zero marketing budget because I had no idea.
To be fair it’s not on right now. The last episode to air was in August. But yeah, the recent revival doesn’t seem to have got a huge amount of publicity. I knew all about it, despite being in the UK, but that’s because Futurama is one of my all time favourite shows and I follow it rabidly.
Yeah, my reaction to this news was “Futurama got un-canceled? Oh, hey, there are two new seasons up on Netflix!”
I’m as close to a superfan of Futurama as I am about anything (I own and have listened to the commentaries for every episode through volume 5), so I did manage to catch most of the past couple seasons on air. Sad that people weren’t even really aware of the existence of their Comedy Central run. When they picked up the rights to run the DVDs, they promoted it pretty hard, but I think they were hurting for programming at the time. They have a whole new slate of shows this year, likely inspired by the success of Tosh.0 (Jeselnik Offensive, Nathan for You), so I think that it hasn’t been fitting into their lineup as well anymore.
The new CC episodes were a little uneven right off the bat, but the good ones were as good as any in the original seasons. It makes sense, they had most of the same writing staff, although they did have a somewhat smaller writer’s room thanks to reduced budgets. They also, of course, retained all of the original voice talent. Looking back at the season 6 listings, there were some really great ones. (The Late Philip J. Fry, Clockwork Origin, Prisoner of Benda, Overclockwise). As noted, their “ripped from the headlines” episodes are pretty weak, but they’ve always been good at straight sci-fi material.
Looking at the Wiki, the final episode of Season 7 is noted as being written as a “possible series finale”, which is nice. I don’t really need closure on these characters, to be honest. They already got more time than anybody ever expected them to, and the good episodes will stand the test of time and re-watches. But I think it would be nice to give them a fitting send-off.
Don’t you people have DVRs? What century is this that anyone gives a damn about TV scheduling? Futurama airs when you turn on the DVR and see it listed.
There was a maddening degree of unevenness in the second run, especially where the writing abandoned science fiction in favor of basically “a wizard did it” when they wanted something to happen plotwise. Mars is destroyed, coming within 100 feet of Earth with no consequenses, later it’s back in orbit with business as usual. All of a sudden, robots can reproduce sexually, something so goddamn stupid I could barely focus on the rest of the episode. The eyePhone episode had nothing new or clever to say about tech trends, yet needed to change the fundamental assumptions about the fictional 30th century to advance its plot. And did we really need to waste episodes on witless recitations of what the writing staff thought about Prop 8, creationism, and birthers? Wasted opportunities all.
However, the good episodes do stand up to the best of the original run.
“Record Futurama” - five thousand repeats now clutter and clog your DVR. The DVR doesn’t know what’s new - it just records every single instance of the thing.
No. What century is this that anyone still has cable? Futurama airs when you open Netflix and see two whole new seasons waiting.
I would rather see Netflix throw some money at Futurama than some generic political drama.
Tivo does, I only get new episodes. Stop buying the crappy DVRs.
The century where I want to watch stuff the same year it airs, I guess.
Buy a DVR? lol
And if you meant “Don’t you people have Tivos?” perhaps that’s what you should have said. ;-)
Every dish and comcast DVR I’ve used for years has been able to discern between new episodes and reruns. There’s always an option when you create a timer.
Yeah I didn’t expect the other DVRs to not have that feature. I think Tivo just gets it out of the data provided by the cable provider so it should be available to every device. Maybe you just didn’t notice the option.
Really wish Cartoon Network would have been able to get the rights to make the new episodes instead of Comedy Central. For some reason I just didn’t have any interest in watching it after Comedy Central bought the rights.
Just watched the first two eps of the “Final Season” (I sure hope those quotes end up being prophetic) and they were really great. They’re back, again.
Yeah, both the new eps were pretty great. They definitely have shucked off the really navel gazing fanservice stuff that comes when you get un-canceled, and are having fun with introducing new characters, concepts, etc. Even little stuff like the Pimparoo could easily have been a recycled character joke, but instead we get fun new additions to the canon.
I was going to say that I might almost be ready for Futurama to be over. But if they keep up the quality of these two, I’d be happy with as long as they want to go.
So was the time button episode the final one? I thought it was a great finish if it was.
Yep, it’s all over. Again.
Good episode to finish, then.
Yeah, that was one of my all time favourite episodes (sadness at the fact of it being a finale aside). By the way, Nerdist did a pre- and post-show with Groening and a bunch of producers and cast members (no DiMaggio unfortunately). Well worth watching on Youtube.