Futurama: 10 Most Emotional Moments
The episodes that made us Philip J. Cry.
As a body of work, if you were to take the entirety of Futurama and compare it to The Simpsons, Futurama is better. It's a big claim. But it's true. The Simpsons, at its greatest, was downright majestic, but as a skewering of the mundanities of real-life it's always had to keep its yellow feet somewhat on the ground. The current lifeless state of the programme indicates that there's only so many stories you can squeeze out of one family having adventures in small-town America. With Futurama, however, those shackles were cast off and the sky wasn't the limit: all of space and time was the limit. Futurama had towering storytelling ambition - it went 1000 years into the future during the first episode, to the moon in the second - and this huge, almost-operatic canvas with which to tell stories gave the show's episodes often dizzying high concepts, but also a crazy amount of tenderness and heartbreak. The show had tragedy built right into its DNA. Before it even gets to its first intro sequence the lead character exclaims: "My parents. My co-workers. My girlfriend. I'll never see any of them again." Whereas the impact of The Simpsons' tender moments were always small but intense, private family triumphs that bring a tear to your eye out of recognition, the scale of Futurama was so much bigger. Featuring time travel, universes rising and falling, characters moving suns out of sheer affection, the show was able to take recognisable feelings of love, loss and sacrifice, deliver them in unexpected ways, and blow them up to colossal proportions. These are the moments from Futurama that tugged at the heartstrings just like Brannigan's Law. Hard. And fast.