Futurama Producer On Final Season And Being Canceled Yet Again

By Rudie Obias | Updated 5 years ago

One of the best science fiction TV shows over the last decade is Futurama. The animated TV series was first birthed on Fox in the late 90s and was unceremoniously canceled a few years later in 2003. Futurama made a comeback with four straight-to-DVD movies and eventually came back altogether to TV on Comedy Central in 2010. Sadly, after 140 episodes, Comedy Central will cancel Futurama at the end of its seventh season.

Futurama’s executive producer David X. Cohen talked to blastr.com about the upcoming second half of season seven and what Futurama fans can expect from the animated series’ end. Cohen expressed his gratitude towards Comedy Central for taking a chance on Futurama by bringing it back from the dead. The basic cable network ordered 52 new episodes of Futurama, extending its initial 26-episode order back in 2010. Cohen said:

When Comedy Central ordered the first set of 26 episodes, I thought that that was sort of a one-off deal to promote the fact that they had gotten the rights to the reruns. So I was pleasantly shocked when they ordered the second set of 26 episodes. It already exceeded all of my expectations for Comedy Central’s support of the show. I really can’t complain. It’s a little bit sad, but they allowed us to have a full, long run of the show that we were denied the first time around. So I don’t feel too bad overall.

Last Wednesday, Futurama premiered with two episodes that further explored Fry and Leela’s relationship. David X. Cohen teased Futurama fans when he mentioned that the pair would get married (again) by the series’ end. He also teased a new episode involving re-creating Futurama into a Saturday morning cartoon. Cohen explained:

Probably a favorite of the staff coming up is a very unusual episode. It’s called ‘Saturday Morning Fun Pit.’ It’s one of our triple-deckers. We’re going to see Futurama reborn as three morning cartoons of the ’60s/’70s/’80s period in the vein of, but legally very different from, Scooby-Doo and The Smurfs and G.I. Joe. Those kind of shows. So we’ll see our characters reborn Saturday-morning style. As I like to say, three ‘craptastic’ morning cartoons.

While it’s sad to see Futurama go, its had a very good run of episodes. We should be happy that we got new episodes after it was initially canceled in 2003 and we can always re-watch re-runs to follow the zany misadventures of the Planet Express crew. Cohen additionally assured fans that Futurama will end very strongly.

“It’s a strong season. If it is the final season, I certainly feel very proud about how we’ll end it, both the season as a whole and the final episode. … We’ve got some tears and some big sci-fi tropes. So we’ve got all of our Futurama bases covered,” said Cohen.

Futurama airs every Wednesday night on Comedy Central. Its final season will feature guest stars George Takei, Larry Bird, Adam West, Burt Ward, Sarah Silverman, Seth MacFarlane, and Dan Castellaneta as the Robot Devil. Take a look at Futurama’s final season below:

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