‘Futurama’ Was Canceled and Revived Before It Ever Found Its Audience

Futurama: A Workplace Sitcom Set in the 31st Century

“Futurama” arrived on Fox in 1999 with a premise built for a joke and a career. Philip J. Fry, a late-20th-century New York City pizza delivery boy, falls into a cryogenic pod just after midnight on January 1, 2000, and reawakens on New Year’s Eve of 2999. He gets a job at Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery company owned by his only living relative, Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth. Matt Groening created the show and developed it with David X. Cohen.

Trailer, via SYFY.

Fry, Leela and Bender

Groening envisioned the series in the mid-1990s while working on “The Simpsons,” and brought Cohen, a fellow writer on that show, aboard to develop storylines and characters for the Fox pitch.

The series is a workplace sitcom first. The crew is small and largely fails to conform to future society, a recurring source of humor. Fry, voiced by Billy West, is gullible and good-hearted, and his love for Leela runs through the whole run.

Leela, voiced by Katey Sagal, is the competent one-eyed captain, raised in the Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium believing herself an alien. She learns she is a mutant from the sewers in the episode “Leela’s Homeworld.” Her name references the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen. Before captaining the ship, she worked as a career assignment officer at the cryogenics lab where she first met Fry. The two eventually become husband and wife.

Bender, voiced by John DiMaggio, is a foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking, cigar-smoking, kleptomaniacal, misanthropic, egocentric, ill-tempered robot built by Mom’s Friendly Robot Company. He is later designated assistant sales manager and cook at Planet Express, despite lacking a sense of taste.

West carries more than one role. He also voices Professor Farnsworth, Zoidberg and Zapp Brannigan. The supporting cast is deep: Tress MacNeille as Mom, Maurice LaMarche as Morbo and Kif Kroker, Lauren Tom as Amy Wong, Phil LaMarr as Hermes Conrad, David Herman as Scruffy.

New New York, Built on Old New York

New New York sits on the ruins of present-day New York City, and the old city has become a catacomb-like sewer called Old New York, home to mutants. The show exaggerates global warming, capitalism, bureaucracy and substance abuse into 31st-century problems that are more extreme and more common. Los Angeles is a smog-filled apocalyptic wasteland.

The Head Museum keeps historical figures and celebrities alive in jars, using technology invented by Ron Popeil, who guest-starred in “A Big Piece of Garbage.” Groening himself appears among the preserved heads. Richard Nixon, dead in 1994, turns up in numerous episodes. The Internet is fully immersive, features its own digital world similar to Tron or The Matrix, and is still slow, mostly pornography, pop-up ads and “filthy” chat rooms.

What the Revivals Proved

Fox dropped it, Adult Swim reran it from 2003 to 2007, four direct-to-video films followed through early 2009, and Comedy Central aired those films as 16 new half-hour episodes. In June 2009, Comedy Central picked up 26 new half-hour episodes, which aired in 2010 and 2011 — the sixth production season, or the seventh and eighth to be broadcast. A seventh production season aired as the ninth (2012) and tenth (2013) broadcast seasons. Hulu revived the series after that.

A show that kept getting written off kept coming back, and the revival seasons added broadcast seasons without losing the original’s shape. The pitch was a delivery company at the turn of the 31st century. The execution sharpened the character work and the satire. “Futurama” earns its place among the best animated comedies because it never treated the future as decoration; it treated it as a workplace, with a boss, a crew and a robot who steals things. Fry and Leela’s slow arc pays off in marriage, and the show’s willingness to end an episode on genuine feeling rather than a gag is what separates it from its peers.

animated sitcom · Bender · Futurama · Leela · Matt Groening · Planet Express