Revive my show...or I will destroy you!

[Fox Network] has begun talks to revive the Emmy-winning animated series and produce a limited number of new episodes, thanks to a resurgence in the show's popularity on DVD and in reruns, Variety reports.

(link.) So Futurama may return from the dead. This news has been greeted with a mixture of hope and trepidation — mostly trepidation — at Casa Fleck y Breen. Hope, because Futurama has the distinction of being one of only two television shows whose entire run was deemed worthy of purchase here at the Casa. In fact, we watched one (Season 4, disc 2 – the reanimated corpse of Spiro Agnew!) just last night.

Trepidation, because, frankly, by season four, Futurama was showing signs of decline. While the season was good, the scripts increasingly showed signs of being written by people who were running out of ideas. If the show hadn't ended when it did, it would have risked becoming what The Simpsons is now; an undead corpse of a show, a zombie that will not die despite having vastly exceeded its natural lifespan. (Side note: Remember, back in the old, old days, when The Simpsons parodied A Prairie Home Companion? Homer stares at the TV in confusion for several minutes, then walks up to it and pounds on it with his fist, shouting "Be funnier!" Damned if I didn't feel exactly like that the last time I saw a current Simpsons episode.)

A key part of Futurama's charm was its endless throwaway über-geek humor — the beer in Klein bottles, the googolplex theater — if new shows can preserve that, then retaining the original voice actors might not be so important. But if it descends to the level of current Simpsons episodes – "hey, we're making a joke here; here's the joke! Get it? Get it? Wasn't that funny? We're so pleased with ourselves!" – then residents of the Casa may just be forced to pretend it doesn't exist, as we've pretty much done with The Simpsons.

Posted by David Fleck at 12 January 2006 12:27 PM