How Futurama Blew Its Second Chance

It's not exactly unprecedented in American television for a show to come back from the dead. It's not even unprecedented in the recent history of cartoons; Family Guy has gone from the grave to long-running stalwart of the very network that killed it within the last few years.

Still, these resurrections are uncommon, Jesus rarely deigning to look up from his busy schedule of completing 40 percent of Tim Tebow's passes to put the special touch on a well-deserving cancelled TV show. And in 2010, when Futurama aired its first new episodes in seven years after being cancelled by FOX, it was certainly deserving.

One of the best shows of the early Aughts, animated or live action, Futurama's merits were many and manifest, and we don't need to go into much detail here. You probably don't need much convincing. There was, in short, every reason to be excited about the prospect of more Futurama.

But as Futurama heads into its final episode tomorrow (which will be reviewed in this space), the verdict on its two post-cancellation seasons must be harsh. The show has largely been mired in mediocrity, its better episodes rising above that lowly state but never approaching the heights of its original run.

The show's problems, post-cancellation, are frequently story-driven in nature. It took Futurama's writing staff two years to figure out what they were doing with the relationship between Fry and Leela, which was an important and devastating flaw; so much of the original run's heart and depth was provided by the gentle yearning and deep feeling that defined Fry's interactions with Leela. This was a particularly baffling development, as Leela's feelings for Fry had been made clear with an explicit declaration of love at the end of the final Futurama movie that had been produced between the show's cancellation and its return.

Instead of moving forward with a relationship between Fry and Leela, the show instead constructed an inconsistent dynamic in which for two seasons Fry and Leela seemed to oscillate between a romantic relationship and a platonic one from episode to episode, all without making clear exactly what was going on between the two.

But while this particular character pairing is important enough to emphasize at some length, the structural issues go deeper. During its two post-cancellation seasons, Futurama's writing staff relied heavily (almost exclusively) on a story formula where a member of the core cast (or the entire core cast) undergoes a significant (and comedic) change, only to have that change reversed in the final 30 seconds or so.

The last two seasons have included episodes where:

• Amy and Bender date and attempt to marry (Proposition Infinity)
• Everyone swaps bodies (The Prisoner of Benda)
• Lurr moves in with Leela (Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences)
• Fry becomes a hideous abomination (The Mutants are Revolting)
• Leela becomes a hideous abomination (The Mutants are Revolting)
• All the characters switch genders (Neutopia)
• Fry becomes a cop (Law and Oracle)
• Fry becomes a hideous abomination (The Butterjunk Effect)
• Fry becomes a hideous abomination (Fun on a Bun)
• An anthology episode where all the characters become different types of animals (Naturama)
• Bender becomes a father, then gives up the kid at the end of the episode (The Bots and the Bees)
• Leela's mother gets a divorce, dates Zapp Brannigan (Zapp Dingbat)
• Leela becomes a hideous abomination (Leela and The Genestalk)

That's...an extensive list, and it betrays a fatal lack of confidence, not to mention a simple deficit of ideas. The reset button is fine, when used sparingly, but late model Futurama slammed it so often that the poor thing should be out of order by now.

It's important not to fall prey to nostalgia. Futurama's first run was not immune from these types of episodes, and some of them (Godfellas, The Sting) are among the show's greatest. It's possible to draw meaningful distinctions between these "sudden change, followed by reset button" episodes, but the biggest difference is simply that the newer episodes aren't as funny.

FOX Network executives played the villain in the story of Futurama's original run, and that's a natural enough fit for them. And their frequent meddling with the show's time slots and air dates surely played a role in Futurama's initial failure to take with TV viewers.

But it's instructive that when Futurama left for the more forgiving and tolerant arms of Comedy Central, its writing staff did not use its new-found creative freedom to explore longer story arcs or innovative methods of storytelling. Instead, they merely took advantage of the basic cable status of their new network to repeatedly say the word "dong." 

One shouldn't overstate the extent of these last two season's struggles; few of the episodes were truly awful, and most were watchable enough. But neither should we understate the disappointment of these new episodes. Futurama's second chance was squandered, and squandered thoroughly, with two forgettable seasons that utterly failed to live up to the show's established level of quality.

As the show comes to (what we presume) is its final end, there's not exactly a sense of relief; Futurama never fell to the depths required for that. But neither is there any real sense that we are losing something of significance by losing Futurama, which wasn't the case when the show first went off the air. 

Instead, the prospect of losing Futurama is met best with a shrug. That is the tragedy of the post-cancellation seasons: they have turned one of television's unique, funny, heartfelt programs into a matter of apathy.