Futurama hits the airwaves again tonight with two all new episodes that I couldn’t be happier with. This has consistently been the funniest show on the air since it started and now that we’re getting into Season 7, though it’s taken us much longer to get here than it should have, the writers have completely hit their stride and every episode delivers the sort of belly laughs I used to expect out of The Simpsons. But this show has always been much smarter and edgier than The Simpsons and the season 7 premiere bears that out.
The first episode of the premiere, The Bots and the Bees, sees Bender knocking up a Beverage Dispenser named Bev (played to hilarious perfection by Wanda Sykes). She bears the child and disappears, leaving Bender to raise the small bot on his own. The episode touches on problems with the lack of sex-ed in schools, custody disputes, deadbeat parents, and is packed front to back with laughs. Episodes starring Bender are usually my favorite and this one certainly didn’t suck.
It also includes a brilliant retelling of the Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer story.
The second episode, A Farewell to Arms, is a play on the Mayan calendar fiasco, and the Earth is scheduled for destruction in the year 3012. They’re working to evacuate Earth on an ancient Martian spaceship (never mind the fact that everyone has their own ships and could leave at their leisure anyway). Insert Zapp Brannigan into the equation and you’ve got the makings for an episode that had me holding my sides from laughing too much.
The moral of the story here? If you love Futurama, these episodes aren’t going to disappoint you in any way. If the episodes remain this consistently good and they cancel this show again, I might need to do something horribly inappropriate in a blustering, Zapp Brannigan sort of way…
Both episodes air on Comedy Central tonight at 10pm. (Though I’d check your local listings for actual times…In Utah, 10pm everywhere else means midnight for us.)
If you need to catch up on Futurama, the first 6 seasons are on Netflix Instant, or you can snag them all on Amazon.