Comedy Central Orders 26 New Episodes Of Futurama

Comedy Central Orders 26 New Episodes Of Futurama

By David Chen/June 9, 2009 2:57 pm EST

When we brought back Family Guy several years ago, everyone said that it was a once in a lifetime thing — that canceled series stay canceled and cannot be revived. But Futurama was another series that fans simply demanded we bring back, and we couldn’t have been happier when Matt and David agreed that there were many more stories yet to tell.

I’ve loved Futurama since it first aired on Fox, and while I wasn’t a huge fan of some of post-series films, I was thrilled at the fact that the show was coming back in any form. In particular, the direct-to-DVD model seemed to be an exciting one, both commercially and artistically. If a vocal fan base could continue to enjoy a show through such means, surely it might have implications for the entertainment industry as a whole? In any case, the last film in the series, Into the Wild Green Yonder, was treated by Futurama creators David Cohen and Matt Groening as though it would be the finale. While Cohen held out hope that there would be more Futurama, he didn’t know what form that might take until now.

One of the biggest issues I had with the DVD films was that they felt disjointed. Each film was obviously written with syndication in mind, and had four distinct 22-minute segments. With the exception of Bender’s Big Score, none of them really cohered as a whole for me. Here’s hoping that without the constraints of the DVD/film format, we’ll see Futurama return to the greatness of seasons 3-5.