4. The Writers Became Under Staffed And Lazy
In order for 20th Century Fox and Comedy Central to apparently afford new episodes, particularly following the financial crisis, they had to cut corners and budgets to pay for the animation. Which meant, a smaller writing staff and a shorter delivery schedule, and based on the quality of the writing of almost all of the new episodes this meant getting rid of as many of the Geeks and Nerds with PhDs and Masters in Computing, that made up the majority of the original writing staff, as possible. Many times throughout seasons 6 and 7, the show would devolve into getting laughs from the repetition of catchphrases, Bender's "I'm Back Baby" or "I'm 40% (Such and such)", Hermes' "My Manwich!", and The Professor's "Good News, Everyone!" was so overused and painful to hear that it can cause painful flashbacks whenever it is heard, when it should be fondly remembered as a signpost for actually quite bad news. Cheap and lazy third act reveals during the early (and probably rushed) episodes of Season 6, were all too common, not to mention uninteresting, forced and, worst of all, predictable. Take Lethal Inspection, where Bender and Hermes the BUREAUCRAT, go off and try to find the BUREAUCRAT who passed Bender as a functional robot despite some flaws. This is meant to be seen as a heartwarming gesture on the part of Hermes, even though it is completely out of character, and a nice way of forcing a backstory of how Bender and Hermes met when Bender was built, even though we've already seen that Bender was built full size and not in the shape of a sobbing humanoid baby. Established Continuity was consistently destroyed thanks to the obtrusive and illogical use of references to contemporary culture. Remember, Fry was frozen on December 31st 1999 and awoke on the same day 1000 years later, with no knowledge of anything that happened in between and limited ability to process new information, civilisation had been destroyed at least twice in the time that he was frozen, along with all video-tapes from his era in 2443 during the second coming of Jesus. That all being said, how can he know who the Kardashian's were/are? In the episode called Benderama, Bender manages to duplicate himself so many times that, according to the Professor, all of the Benders would soon consume all the matter on Earth, Fry then pipes up, almost to camera, in his most moronic of voices "Like the Kardashians!", the episode then carries on as normal, that joke makes no benefit at all to the rest of the episode other than making a reference to some currently famous people that too many audience members would recognise. Jokes like this had been used before but at least they had made sense in terms of everything around them, e.g. Fry bashing that evolution isn't taught in Kansas in Into The Wild Green Yonder, still believable in 3009. Futurama used to be intelligent and wacky with reasonably subtle allegories that people could relate to, as the best sci-fi should do, except with seasons 6 and 7 they resorted to quick and easy retellings of current events with nothing there to mask it.