One Last New Episode of Futurama

Ant writes "Futurama's last new episode airs tonight at 7:00 PM on Fox." If you're missing your fix, there's a Futurama website with entirely too much Futurama info.

Comments

Subscriber bastards!

[stevens]

One comment's up and already the gotfuturama.com site's down.

I'm sorry to see Futurama go. It started getting really funny, and I will use "Bite my shiny metal ass" in response to silly feature requests for many years.

I bought the first episode DVDs already. *Sigh* and I will buy the rest when they come out...

What is there to say?

[orkysoft]

Futurama was without a doubt the greatest and funniest tv series I have ever seen. I'm also not surprised about the amount of Futurama quotes I see in sigs here on Slashdot. Check my friends list, most of them have them :-)

Bite my shiny metal... OH NOOO!

Re:What is there to say?

[Tony Hoyle]

I suppose it depends on how you percieve it. For me, the Simpsons had its day years ago.. I don't even bother watching the new episodes any more because they've completely run out of ideas (there's only so far you can push the 'homer is stupid, lisa is neglected, and bart should be in care' line). It was all very two dimensional, since it had to reflect the boring life of a power plant worker each week (one who never actually to work, except in a couple of episodes.. no wonder he was trying to drink himself to death).

OTOH Futurama had a lot further to go, because they could introduce new ideas each episode... no preconcieved ideas of what was possible and plenty of B-movies to do parodies of.

Sad..

[OmniVector]

Futurama (made by Matt Groening) was a lot better than Simpsons ever was. Though i'm sure that will start a holy war.

The simspsons was geared a lot towards children usually, where I always felt Futurama was more for adults (Any one remember the death by snu-snu joke in the amazon woman episode?)

Oh well, just another shining example of how Fox knows how to cancel the best shows: Now i've lost my family guy AND futurama fix :(

Re:Sad..

[Chairboy]

Oh geez....

There are a bunch of things wrong with your post, but I'll stick to one that you should understand. Here's what you wrote:

"Oh well, just another shining example of how Fox knows how to cancel the best shows: Now i've lost my family guy AND futurama fix :("

The thing about this is that Fox actually approved/funded/aired these shows in the first place. Fox is far from perfect, I'm no fanboy, but the other big networks don't tolerate stuff like Family Guy and Futurama. Fox stuck with the show through four years of poor ratings, and with Family Guy through three years or so of dismal ratings.

Fox is a business. They need to maximize profits. That aside, the fact that they take risks on shows like these is good for us, because occasionally, the quirky show turns out to be a money maker.

Re:Sad..

[Karl Cocknozzle]

The thing about this is that Fox actually approved/funded/aired these shows in the first place. Fox is far from perfect, I'm no fanboy, but the other big networks don't tolerate stuff like Family Guy and Futurama.

Fox certainly is willing to take risks other networks don't... That is how it works if you want people to watch your fourth banana network. Imagine how hard it is to get good shows if you're a fifth or sixth banana, like UPN/WB are? However, part of taking risks is knowing that you sometimes have to STICK WITH IT for a while, and not just by not cancelling it.

Fox stuck with the show through four years of poor ratings, and with Family Guy through three years or so of dismal ratings.

Fox did more to sabotage that show than they did to help it. (Many television networks are guilty of this, not just Fox. See also "Ed" on NBC.) First, they changed timeslots over and over and over again so that even people who already KNEW the show was good never knew when to tune in. Frequent timeslot changes had more to do with Family Guy not finding a big audience in first run. The show should be on where "Malcolm in the Middle" is now, and Malcolm should be slinging shakes at Mc Donald's.

Contrast this with Cartoon Network, where Family Guy beat Jay Leno AND David Letterman COMBINED in the 18-34 demographic several evenings in July. How did this happen? They picked a good time, put it on, left it there, and promoted it. Amazingly enough people watch.

This is both extraordinary and revolutionary... [/sarcasm]

Re:Sad..

[squiggleslash]

Futurama was shown for four years, of which for three it was put in a time slot where it'd be pre-empted by continually overrunning sports programmes for most of the year - Fox saw it as quality filler, not as a program to built an audience for.

Re:Sad..

[ctr2sprt]

My impression of the Futurama situation is that the show wasn't canceled because of lack of money or viewers, but instead because of politics. Apparently Groening got a much better contract this time around, which allowed him not just to keep greater control of the show, but also take home more of the profits from it. Groening, at least, believes that Fox are resentful of that and so have tried to keep the show moderately, but not highly, successful. So they keep stuffing it into timeslots where they know it will be preempted, not advertising it at all, and so on. Keep in mind that despite this screwing the show's ratings were pretty much in line with King of the Hill, a more mainstream show in a better timeslot. I have no idea if this is still the case, but it was back when Fox made the decision not to get any more Futurama episodes.

I don't have a problem with Fox canceling shows that nobody watches. (I don't like it, but hey, it happens.) My problem is that they didn't seem to give Futurama a chance after the first season. It's honestly like they were trying to kill it, and many people close to the situation say that's exactly what was happening.

Sigh...

[rbullo]

Why is it that the good shows never last? For example, Family Guy was hilarious, but Fox cancelled it because advertisers were reluctant to run ads on such an edgy show. Now they are taking down Futurama, which is consistently funnier than this newest season of The Simpsons. And shows like King of the Hill, of which only the first season was funny to me, is still going strong. And don't get me started on that prime-time soap opera known as Friends.

Re:Sigh...

[utd-blaze]

I can respect that you dont think king of the hill is funny. Different people have different tastes in comedy, but understand that king of the hill is a quality show. I have never seen a tv show capture the look, feel, and soul of a community the way that king of the hill portrays alren (arlen is a psuedonym for garland, a dallas suburb). Anyone from the area will tell you that king of the hill is not a comedy, its a documentary.

Re:Sigh...

[Thing 1]

king of the hill is a quality show.

I second that, and am constantly amazed that Mike Judge (creator of Beavis and Butthead) managed to make such a good family-oriented show, which several times has brought a tear to my eye. Very well-written, although obviously catering to a different audience. Not always funny (but Dale is hilarious), but very touching.

Heh, heh. He said "touching."

Indeed a sad, sad day.

[rvcrazy]

Unfortunately, this was my first thought when I awoke this morning. I suppose we can all only be thankful that Fox now has more room in their schedule for "reality" shows, When Car Chasing High-Speed Animals are Attacked by Couples Married by America, and some other nonsense about objects removed from people in emergency rooms.

I truly am disgusted with television, and really only look forward to The Simpsons and B5 reruns. I can't see anything coming up that remotely appeals to me.

Fox network is a joke

[Karl Cocknozzle]

At least now they'll have thirty more minutes available for more lowbrow, idiot level programming... Good thing. People might start to think that the networks were actually trying to provide good entertainment in exchange for all of that publicly owned broadcast spectrum they've been granted exclusive use of for the last 75 or so years. Maybe it is time to take that spectrum back?

After all, those licenses were granted to provide a broadcast service "in the public interest", but when was the last time you saw something on TV that wasn't crap? You could even argue that the majority of commercial broadcasting actually makes people more stupid. That can't POSSIBLY be in the public's interest.

PBS has some good stuff, maybe History Channel, but what else? Along the same lines, when was the last time you heard a radio program (besides NPR) that wasn't the same recycled viagra jokes/top 40 playlist as every other station on the dial? Granted, Clear Channel is making plenty of money, but what about the public, the people the broadcaster's were entrusted to serve?

Re:Fox network is a joke

[bnenning]

Granted, Clear Channel is making plenty of money, but what about the public, the people the broadcaster's were entrusted to serve?

Clear Channel, Fox, et al are making money precisely because the public voluntarily chooses their programming.

Re:sad but

[NanoGator]

" but for some reason it never had that "must see the next episode now" magic. "

For me it was because Fox kept pre-empting it for football. That and the 7pm time-slot was actually kind of hard to catch. Simpsons had me programmed to be ready at 8. Man I was addicted to that show when it was on right after the Simpsons.

What really bugged me was that they showed Star Wars one Sunday at 5pm. Futurama would normally have been on at 7pm, following Star Wars. Seems like a pretty damn good lineup, dontcha think? Nope. We got two eps of King of the Hill that day.

I can understand that Futurama didn't do it for ya, but I feel rather strongly that Fox really blew it when it came to giving Futurama a chance to develop a strong audience.

Re:sad but

[lightsaber1]

I agree...FOX has to be THE worst network for scheduling consistency. The only thing you know for sure is when Simpsons is, well, except when they move it to 7:00 so they can show a movie at 8...between that and the endless commercials, it's ridiculous.

FOX has some really good shows, and some really lousy shows, unfortunately they seem to focus more on pumping out a lot of lousy shows rather than focusing on the really good ones. Simpsons has taken a significant downturn in the last few years (since reality tv came out...coincidence? maybe). They seem to have gotten better this last season, but seasons 12 and 13 were really quite pathetic. They've also had several really good shows (imho) that they just didn't care about and dropped because nobody was watching or whatever -- except it was impossible to tell when the shows would be on...no wonder. Futurama and Family Guy both fit into this category.

Let's just hope they don't blow it with their next good idea...and enough with the reality crap people! If I wanted reality, I'd go out...TV is supposed to be a break from reality.

Re:sad but

[Alaska Jack]

I know the whole "Jump the Shark" thing is overdone, but with the Simpsons, I can point to exactly the moment when the show jumped for me.

It was when the doctors found Homer was stupid because he had a crayon jammed in his brain. Removing it made him smart, but there was a difficult period of adjustment, so at the end of the episode, he put the crayon back.

That's not funny. That's f*&cking tragic and depressing.

Re:sad but

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I finally realized that Fox was actively trying to kill Futurama when they pre-empted the show for post game football. I just hope the newer episodes make their way onto Comedy Central.