Futurama

Our Review

The best animated sci-fi comedy ever made — a show about a delivery boy frozen for 1,000 years who wakes up in the year 3000 and finds the future is just as stupid as the present, but with more tentacles. Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s masterpiece out-Simpsons’d the Simpsons by being genuinely hard sci-fi when the plot called for it: the show does actual math (a body-swapping theorem written for the show is mathematically real) and emotional payoffs that arrive from a mile away and still devastate.

The Jurassic Bark episode (Fry’s dog waiting for him, forever) is the most famous tearjerker in animation; Luck of the Fryrish (the seven-leaf clover, the brother who never betrayed him) is even better. Bender the sociopath robot, Leela the one-eyed orphan captain, Professor Farnsworth’s “Good news, everyone!” as always-bad news — the cast is perfect. Canceled, revived, canceled, revived: the show has died more than Fry and come back every time, and the Hulu revival seasons prove the engine still runs.

Verdict: Watch it. Shut up and take my streaming money.