8 Reasons Futurama Doesn't Need A Season 8

5. Hasn't Animation Moved On?

Futurama Bender
Netflix

Futurama regularly broke the hearts of viewers over the years. Fry's loyal dog. Philip Fry the Original Martian. The holophone symphony that Fry performs for Leela. It was always a show that often had much more emotional depth than its contemporaries.

The problem for Futurama when it returns in 2023, is that adult animation has moved on in the meantime. Moving though a lot of Futurama is, it doesn't have the depth or dramatic scope of a BoJack Horseman. Meanwhile, a series like Big Mouth balances crude humour with genuine pathos as it tackles puberty.

Both of these series have consequences too, something that Futurama often only paid lip service to. Fry and Leela finally got together in later series, except in some episodes it felt that they weren't really together at all. Will the revival stick to the reset button approach that Futurama and so many other animated series have relied upon?

If there's a proper over-arching story to tell with the return of the Planet Express team then that's great. If it's another series of loosely tied one-off adventures then it runs the risk of feeling retrograde. Look at what's happened to The Simpsons and Family Guy, the same characters, stuck in broadly the same situations with little to no changes. Futurama was always better than that.

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Contributor

Citizen of the Universe, Film Programmer, Writer, Podcaster, Doctor Who fan and a gentleman to boot. As passionate about Chinese social-realist epics as I am about dumb popcorn movies.