What We'll Miss About Futurama

For sci-fi fans who've had their hearts broken by too many too-early cancellations to list (we each have one we'll never quite get over), Futurama's seven seasons -- spread over more than fourteen years and two networks -- actually represent nearly the best fate any of us could wish for a beloved show. It delighted a core group of die-hard fans for its initial run; it came back as not just one movie but four; it was revived for a new run of episodes; and it got to make a graceful final bow right around the time that its quality was starting to trend down. That sounds like a dis, but I feel like it's the right way for a show to die a natural death: when it's cancelled at its strongest point, the audience is left yearning for more, whereas when the ratio of good episodes to bad starts getting around 4:1, we're happy to let it drift off peacefully, so that most of our memories of it can still be fond.

There are things I won't miss about Futurama. For instance, the overpraised "heartfelt" episodes -- seven-leaf clover, Leela (voice of Katey Sagal) finally learning the truth about her parents, fucking Seymour the goddamn dog that waited forever for Fry (voice of Billy West) like a goddamn idiot. I won't miss the late-model episodes, like this season's "Game Of Tones," "Murder On The Planet Express," and especially "Saturday Morning Fun Pit," that relied less for story on actual invention and more on South Park-esque direct reference/parody. I won't miss the producers yawing wildly from Fry and Leela being a couple to...not.

But I definitely liked (or loved!) more episodes than not, so here are a few of the things that -- even though I rarely allow myself to get sentimental about TV comings and goings -- I am a little sad to know are done forever. Or probably forever.

Time Travel: Over the course of its life, or lives, Futurama's producers were good at knowing how high its audience's tolerance would be for long-form story arcs: not very. Just because they share a sci-fi pedigree doesn't mean that Futurama should follow the X-Files model by overcomplicating its plotlines. Whenever the show would check back in with Nibbler (voice of Frank Welker) and the Niblonian plan to position Fry in the right place and time to maintain the correct order in the universe, it felt surprising and fun and appropriately self-contained.

Science Fiction: If you listen to the commentaries on the Futurama DVDs, you get a sense of how much thought producers gave to the actual scientific facts that underpinned the show's fantastical comic plot elements, from putting real math equations up on screen to seeding episodes with an actually translatable "alien" alphabet. At the same time, the show's writers had the confidence to throw this stuff out when "with science" worked well enough as an explanation for whatever needed to happen in order to move a storyline forward.

Zoooooooooidberg! Zoidberg (voice of West, again) was always deployed just often, and just pathetically enough for this viewer never to get tired of him, and as we mentioned when we discussed "Time Keeps On Slipping" on the podcast, the few episodes that revolved around him were generally strong. In a way, I already lost the Zoidberg I loved, since the show decided to make him Futurama's Phoebe by giving him a late-in-the-series true love (Emilia Clarke's Marianne in last week's episode) and saving him from permanent sad sackitude. But he'll always be this guy to me.

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