Oft-Canceled ‘Futurama’ Always Gets ‘Short End of Stick,’ Says the Voice of Bender

Is Futurama the Rodney Dangerfield of adult animation? 

John DiMaggio, the actor who voices Bender, believes the show gets no respect. From shuffling time slots to actual cancellations, Matt Groening’s other creation has “been getting the short end of the stick for a while,” DiMaggio told Newsweek.  

Let’s count the ways in which Futurama has received the Dangerfield treatment:

• Groening conceived the show as a companion to The Simpsons, a self-created superblock of cartoon comedy. Fox had other ideas, using Futurama as a utility player and plugging it into various holes in its primetime lineup so that audiences were never sure where to find it. 
• “When we were on Fox, I was working on King of the Hill and Futurama at the time,” said David Herman, another one of the show’s voice actors (Scruffy the Janitor, Mayor Poopenmeyer, Dr. Ogden Wernstrom). “We were on at 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. — and Fox’s slogan was ‘It all starts at 8.’”
• Despite Futurama taking home an Emmy for Best Animated Program in 2004, ingrate Fox canceled the show that same year.
• The show did so well in reruns on Adult Swim and Comedy Central that the latter commissioned made-for-TV movies and two additional seasons. Once again, Futurama won the Emmy for Best Animated Program in 2011. Once again, Comedy Central gave it the ax. “I don‘t know how many times we‘ve been canceled,” DiMaggio says. “I‘ve lost count.”

Getting canceled has become a running joke on the show itself. If you’re powerless to fight the networks’ mercurial whims, might as well at least have some self-referential fun.

After another long hiatus, Hulu once again picked up Futurama, greenlighting a couple of additional seasons, with a new 10-episode run begins running this week. Finding a streaming benefactor like Hulu is great and all, but did it really have to go down like this? “We’re very ecstatic about (returning),” says DiMaggio, “but we’re also like, you could have just kept on doing the show. It would have been just fine.”

Is it difficult to stop and start with years in between seasons? “It’s like riding a bike, really,“ he says. “And everybody’s just as good, you know, the second and third and fourth and fifth time.“

At least Futurama can finally rest easy, right? Right? “It’s glorious to be back, but I just want you to know we’ve always been on the bubble," says Herman. “Everywhere we’ve been, except for maybe Hulu. Hulu is very supportive.”

For now, anyway. But cancellation, like death, is inevitable for us all. “Yeah, always,” DiMaggio says. “But who cares?”

Herman also takes a philosophical view. “There’s not an actor I know that doesn’t think like this is the last job I’m gonna have.”