Futurama Refuses to Die, and I Am So Grateful

I have genuinely lost count of how many times I have said goodbye to this show. I remember watching the original Fox finale as a teenager, fully convinced that was the last I would ever see of the Planet Express crew. I remember the DVD movies feeling like a genuine miracle. I remember the Comedy Central finale in 2013 hitting me harder than I expected a cartoon about a pizza delivery boy frozen for a thousand years had any right to hit. And then, a decade later, I remember opening Hulu in the summer of 2023 and seeing new Futurama episodes sitting right there, and feeling something I can only describe as pure disbelief.

We have written about this show’s staying power before, including a deep look at how Matt Groening’s other masterpiece became a timeless sci-fi classic, and we were even in the room for the Futurama panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, where a surprise unofficial appearance from Orlando Jones nearly stole the whole show. But today I want to focus specifically on the part of this show’s story that still genuinely amazes me: this is one of the most cancelled and resurrected series in television history, and it keeps coming back anyway. Here is the complete, genuinely unusual story of how that happened.

The First Death: Fox, 1999 to 2003

Futurama premiered on Fox on March 28, 1999, created by Matt Groening fresh off his work on The Simpsons, alongside writer David X. Cohen. It followed Philip J. Fry, a hapless pizza delivery boy accidentally cryogenically frozen on New Year’s Eve 1999 and revived a thousand years later, finding work at an interplanetary delivery company alongside the one-eyed Leela, the perpetually scheming robot Bender, and a crew that somehow survives constant explosions, invasions, and cosmic stupidity. From the very beginning, the show had a genuinely rough relationship with its own network. Fox shuffled its timeslot constantly and showed little confidence in the series, and the ratings never had a fair chance to build under those conditions. Fox quietly stopped ordering new episodes, and the show went out of production after its fourth season, closing out its original Fox run with the bittersweet, semi-musical “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” in 2003.

What almost nobody talks about enough is how good that first run actually was underneath the cancellation drama. As we put it in our own retrospective on the show, its secret weapon was always its writing staff, many of whom held advanced degrees in physics, math, and computer science, which gave even the silliest jokes about time travel and string theory a strange, genuine authenticity. And episodes like “Jurassic Bark” and “The Luck of the Fryrish” proved early on that this was never just a Simpsons knockoff in space. It was a show that could make you cry over a dog fossil and laugh at Bender’s selfishness in the very same half hour.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

The First Resurrection: Straight to DVD, 2007 to 2009

In the years immediately after cancellation, Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block picked up Futurama for syndicated reruns, and watching the show find a real audience there proved something the original network run never fully got the chance to prove: people actually wanted this show. Fueled by that rerun success and strong DVD sales, Futurama was revived in 2007, not as a traditional television season, but as four direct-to-video feature films: Bender’s Big Score, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender’s Game, and Into the Wild Green Yonder, released between 2007 and 2009. It was a genuinely strange way for a cancelled show to come back, but it worked.

The Second Life: Comedy Central, 2010 to 2013

Comedy Central saw an opportunity in those four films and struck a deal to re-cut them into sixteen traditional half-hour episodes, airing them as an official fifth season. The response was strong enough that Comedy Central ordered genuinely new material soon after, bringing the show back for a proper sixth season in 2010 and 2011, delivering some of the network’s highest ratings at the time. A seventh season followed, split across 2012 and 2013, and even that season’s own finale, “Overclockwise,” was produced as a potential series-ending episode in case the show did not get renewed again. It did, for one final stretch. But Futurama’s luck ran out again in 2013, and Comedy Central confirmed the seventh season would be its last. The finale, “Meanwhile,” aired on September 4, 2013, giving Fry and Leela a long, genuinely happy life together through a deceptively simple time travel premise before looping the story back around to its beginning. For the second time, this looked like the actual end.

For nearly a decade, it stayed that way. The closest fans got to new material was a one-off audio episode released through The Nerdist Podcast in 2017, and a genuinely fun 2014 crossover episode, “Simpsorama,” which aired as part of The Simpsons and gave the Planet Express crew one last on-screen adventure before the long silence set in.

The Third Resurrection: Hulu, 2023 to Now

Then, in February 2022, Hulu announced it was reviving Futurama for a twenty-episode run, the show’s third different network home. The announcement came with a genuinely complicated negotiation behind it, most notably a public standoff over fair pay for voice actors that delayed John DiMaggio’s return as Bender, a fight fans affectionately, and accurately, nicknamed Bendergate. Original stars Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, and Phil LaMarr all returned alongside him once the deal came together, and the new episodes premiered on Hulu in July 2023, arriving almost seamlessly from where “Meanwhile” left off. The satire simply found new targets, cryptocurrency, streaming culture, AI, and cancel culture became the new playground for Groening’s brand of humor, proof that Futurama’s futuristic mockery of 1999 had somehow become even more relevant twenty-five years later.

The revival has actually stuck around this time. Hulu renewed the show again, extending its contract with the cast and writers, and as of this writing, Futurama is now well into its run of new seasons, an odyssey that took over two decades to reach this point. Fans got a real taste of that ongoing momentum in person at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, where the panel included a live table read of an upcoming new episode, and the crowd packed the ballroom specifically for the Futurama announcement. Across its entire history, the show has earned a genuinely remarkable haul of awards for a series that has technically ended and come back from the dead three separate times.

Why This Show Keeps Getting Saved

I think about this a lot, honestly. Plenty of beloved shows get cancelled and simply stay cancelled, no matter how loudly fans campaign for them. Futurama is different, and I think it comes down to something specific about what the show actually is underneath the jokes about robots and mutants and the year 3000. It is a genuinely sincere show about found family, about Fry choosing this strange, chaotic crew of coworkers as his people after losing everyone and everything he ever knew. It never talked down to its audience, whether it was on Fox, Comedy Central, or Hulu, and it earned a permanent place in internet culture along the way. “Shut up and take my money,” a line from the episode “Attack of the Killer App,” became a genuine, lasting meme precisely because the show’s humor stuck with people long after the episodes aired.

That combination has apparently been durable enough to survive three cancellations, three different homes, and a decade-long gap that felt, at the time, completely final. I do not know if this current run will be the last new Futurama I ever get, and honestly, I have learned not to assume anything about this show’s future one way or the other. What I do know is that betting against Futurama has been a losing bet for over twenty years running, and I am not about to start now.

How many times have you said goodbye to this show, only to have it come back? What’s your favorite era, Fox, Comedy Central, or Hulu? Drop it in the comments.