Futurama: 10 Things It Did Better Than The Simpsons

10. Linear Storytelling

The Simpsons has been around for nearly 30 years, but with 29 seasons and more than 630 episodes, there hasn't been much linear storytelling. Sure, you have characters like Sideshow Bob coming up from time-to-time indicating he has been off doing something other than attempting to kill Bart, but that's about it.

Over at Futurama, linear storytelling is the name of the game. The series began with Fry getting frozen in the cryogenics laboratory and continued in "real time" from the year 2,999 until the series concluded in the year 3,013. Those dates mirror (somewhat) the actual dates the series ran (1999-2013), only 1,000 years in the future.

Through the course of the show, the characters grow and develop from beginning to end. Fry's involvement with Leela progressed, Zoidberg got a girl, and Bender learned some valuable lessons.

At the end of an episode, things aren't reset to the way they were before. There was a joke about that at the end of When Aliens Attack, which featured a great deal of destruction. The damage remained as Fry joked that "It was just a matter of knowing the secret of all television: at the end of the episode, everything is back to normal."