Here’s Why Matt Groening Says the 10-Year Break Was Great for ‘Futurama’

According to Futurama creator Matt Groening, a decade off the air was a welcome break for the series — after all, look how much better Fry’s life got when he took that thousand-year sabbatical.

Late last month, Futurama Season 12 opened with a not-so-timely takedown of Non-Fungible Tokens that confusingly included a solid seven minutes of expository dialogue describing the principles of cryptology behind 2021’s hottest get-rich-quick scheme. The fan backlash to “The One Amigo” and criticisms of the outdated topical humor provoked an irate reaction from Futurama star and Bender voice-actor John DiMaggio, who told the naysayers to “bite my shiny metal ass!” if they don’t like the pop-culture jokes in the new episodes. Still, some Futurama fans continue to questioning whether or not the series has enough novel ideas left for the next two and a half seasons of its Hulu deal.

Though the more critical contingency of the Futurama fandom feels that the show is playing an embarrassing game of pop-culture catch-up after so many years off the air, Groening disagrees that being behind the zeitgeist is a hindrance. In an interview with the Spanish publication El País, he argued that having a decade’s worth of cultural backlog is an absolute dark matter mine for Futurama.

“The secret of science fiction is that it’s really not about the future — it’s about right now," Groening said of Futurama’s relationship with the real world in 2024. "We just dress it up with advanced technology and the glorious contradictions and insanity of contemporary life.”

However, as Groening noted, commenting on contemporary life is a demanding task, and a little 10-year vacation was just what Futurama needed to recharge its batteries. “One of the nice things about Futurama is that we were able to take a break for a while and think of new stories. Because we were off the air for about 10 years, a lot of things happened in the culture and in science fiction,” Groening said, comparing the current state of Futurama to the topical approach of his other popular property. “The Simpsons, on the other hand, has been on the air as a TV series since 1989, and we never take a break.”

The other advantage that Futurama has in its newest iteration, Groening explained, is fresh writers. “Those of us who’ve been around for a long time, we’re older. It’s always nice to get young, fresh voices in the picture. And the new writers are fantastic,” Groening said of the Hulu squad. “What’s great about Futurama is that our newer writers and animators have grown up on the show, so they know it in a different way. (And the team has) more diversity and more women.”

Of course, if all those younger voices and the decade of culture with which to work doesn’t amount to much more than Twitter-level jokes about topics that have been overplayed for years, then maybe Groening ought to think about an even newer approach to making Futurama. Stay tuned for the obligatory Futurama A.I. episode next Monday.