Normally, this sort of talk is all speculative, but Variety is reporting it and that’s usually a pretty damned hopeful sign.

Comedy Central has ordered 26 brand new episodes of Futurama and intends to have them on the air by mid next year.

“It was a little bit of putting our toe in the water to see what sort of response we could get,” said 20th Century Fox TV chairman Gary Newman. “We discovered that, like ‘Family Guy,’ there’s a passionate core audience and a tremendous pent-up demand to see more ‘Futurama.’ ”

But it took Comedy Central to seal the deal. The cabler started airing all 72 off-net episodes of “Futurama,” as well as the DVD episodes, in January 2008.

Since then, both 20th and Comedy Central have been kicking around ways to make a “Futurama” order make financial sense for both the studio and cable net.

I think, perhaps, my heart just leapt for joy.

Seriously, this is the best news I’ve heard in weeks.

You can read Variety’s full report here.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, about how if Fox chooses to exercise the right, they can run it on their network first before Comedy Central syndicates and the like. Matt Groening is also heavily quoted.