Futurama’s revival is unfrozen and back from a different time
Futurama is coming back thanks to Hulu, and we finally have a trailer to give us a sneak peak of the show’s first new episodes in a decade. Unfortunately, season 11 already feels behind the times, even though the new season doesn’t come out for another month.
The trailer still has the kind of silly slapstick and ridiculous comedy that Futurama is full of, like Bender disintegrating someone immediately after a battle ends, or Bender making a donkey burrow out of a locked room. But the trailer also has quite a few jokes that feel like they were frozen sometime in early last year and thawed out now when they’re barely clinging to relevance.
There’s a joke about visiting a lawless corner of the space known as Crypto Country, and jokes about a pandemic and nasal swab tests that Zoidberg says they’ll have to use hundreds of times. It’s not just that these jokes feel old, irrelevant, and played out, it’s that they aren’t particularly funny either.
The good news is, all of the things that make Futurama great don’t really fit in a trailer. At its absolute best, Futurama is a show that thrives on fantastic premises for episodes, something you can’t really show in a two-minute preview. But to know for sure how season 11 will turn out, we’ll have to wait for the show to arrive on July 26 on Hulu. The series will stream one episode a week for its entire 10-episodes season 11 run, and will be followed by season 12 sometime in the future.
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