That being said, I felt that the new episodes never captured the quality of the original run. They tried too hard at tugging at our heart strings and never really felt legitimate, unlike the episodes like "Luck of the Fryish", "Jurassic Bark", etc. I thought the last season was actually bad, and the plots never made any sense, so I guess it was about time for it to end its run.
I often felt like the earlier seasons got too caught up in their own worldbuilding and forgot the funny. "The Why of Fry" was my personal least favorite, retconning the entire premise of the show and Nibbler's nature, and straining on a single joke of Fry's stupidity for the entire episode. Other low points included the forced Amy-Kif relationship that had little comedy content and less meaning, Leela's retconned family, and any time filled by Zapp Brannigan's one-note attempts at jokes. Futurama can't credibly do gross-out or shock humor in a world where Family Guy cranks it up to eleven every week.
Futurama is best as a joke turbine playing off the future setting, and IMO strains for misguided impact whenever it brings up how Fry's family lost a son. I never bought in to the heartstring-tugging. The characters are too broadly drawn and fantastical to care about, unlike the Simpsons. The Comedy Central seasons seem to have figured this out, realizing that it's too late in the game for any more meaningful character material. Instead, the show has seriously stressed the pacing and density of the comedy, which for me really shines now.
Opinions on humor are subjective, but I'd like to point out that this was set up from the beginning and not at all a retcon. For example we can see Nibbler's shadow in the first episode: http://theinfosphere.org/Nibbler%27s_shadow
Edit: link corrected thanks to meandthebean
You could call it Simpson's Syndrome: a comedy show without planned story-lines or definite end-dates will have a distinctly hard time developing its characters.
Comedy Central is also to blame, in my opinion. The initial run was short and inconsistent. I had my DVR set to record any first-run episode, but I feel like i never caught any. A show can't succeed if it's never on the air.
I think the biggest problem tv-media is the hiatus, the blanks between seasons cause an eraser from the general public. If they good give a consist stream of content, fans would be much more in-tune with it, and less to forget about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5592733
http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/04/22/futurama-not-renewed-comed...
edit I'm not complaining, but it is a little bit frustrating to have it flagged then see a 3rd-level derived article show up. How can I prevent it in the future?
I haven't flagged your submission (I've never flagged anything, around here). FWIW, though, I still find the article I linked to much more interesting that the EW one, because it focuses on the science and geeky aspects of futurama. I don't see it as "a 3rd-level derived article", but as "a scientist's take on the show and its cancellation".
Under that light, then, I'm not sure it should be prevented.
Edit: By "not sure it should be prevented", I don't mean that I think your submission should have been flagged. I mean that I think the same fact can allow for multiple submissions, and a derived article may be more interesting than the original source.
In this case the opposite happened, but the primary source was killed. I know this is all a bit meta for HN, but even more meta, I'm finding it more and more frustrating to submit things as so many sites are now set to auto-kill.
Sorry if such and such news site is considered too biased, but it may be the only or primary source for a story. The autokill is also surprisingly biased in and of itself. For example, an article posted from Android Police will get killed, while an article MacRumors won't.
People tend to confuse the times after the films where there were no new episodes to show and none in production with a cancellation, because the films themselves did not bring the show back to television. That's like saying Arrested Development is cancelled after the film is released, because no new film or television episodes has been ordered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama#Cancellation_and_revi...
Even restricting ourselves purely to mature comedy shows, I would argue that Archer and Venture Bros are better than the latest season. I highly recommend checking them out.
Other great animated Western shows: Adventure Time and Bob's Burgers.
Maybe it's just the geek in me talking, but what about Adventure Time, and the two Avatar series? Very well done from a technical standpoint, fun to watch, decent writing too.
Though I do think Adventure Time is too far into stoner humor. I watch the show and just want to turn it off and go play Legend of Zelda.
This is the first episode I watched start to finish. I never really got into Futurama from just passively watching it but this episode also stuck in my mind, it was fantastic. Although the author's book may have been used, the influence of the episode was Poul Andreson's Flight to Forever[1].
I think that the 'Fausto' episode, finale of the S05, was by far the best ending Futurama had.
