No show on television has been buried and dug back up as often as this one. Fox killed it in 2003, Comedy Central revived it in 2010, that ended in 2013, Hulu revived it again in 2023, and now the fourteenth broadcast season is the last full season “Futurama” will ever get. After this it becomes three extended specials and nothing else. So there is something almost unfair about how on the nose the premiere is, because “Beef” is an episode about a man who cannot let go of something that died a thousand years ago, and about a scientist who decides the sensible response to extinction is to clone it back.
Two episodes landed August 3 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+, with the rest of the season going out weekly on Mondays. Matt Groening and showrunner David X. Cohen announced the ending at San Diego Comic-Con alongside the trailer, and Hulu greenlit three XXXL-sized specials at the same time, the first of them Christmas-themed and due in 2027. The voice cast is unchanged: John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman, which is its own quiet achievement twenty-seven years after the pilot.
The pairing they chose to open with is a Fry episode and a Bender episode, which is the safest possible statement of intent and also the correct one. One is about appetite and grief, the other is a Deep South chase movie with a robot in it. Neither is trying to be a finale, and after a season order that comes with an expiry date attached, that restraint is a relief. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Futurama” season 14, both premiere episodes, and what Fry does to win a hot dog eating contest.
No show on television has been buried and dug back up as often as this one.”
“Beef” starts at Coney Island, which is where Fry’s whole unfinished business lives. A thousand years ago he came second in the hot dog eating contest there, by two hot dogs, to a competitive eater called Brocky J. That is the wound, and the episode treats it with exactly the seriousness Fry treats it with, which is total. Brocky J himself is long dead, having died of food poisoning from a half-eaten raw hot dog, and in the sort of detail this show has always been good at, that hot dog has been preserved as memorabilia rather than thrown away.
The complication is that Fry cannot even get a rematch on his own terms, because cows are extinct in the thirty-first century and the sausages that replaced them are plant-based. They do not go down the way the originals did. Anyone who has ever tried to recreate a specific childhood food will recognise the problem, and the episode is smart enough to know that the grievance is not really about texture. Professor Farnsworth’s solution is to bring back the cow, and his method is the one you are already thinking of.
It is the “Jurassic Park” method, with one substitution that is the best joke in the episode: instead of a mosquito trapped in amber, the DNA source is Brocky J’s preserved hot dog. So the cows come back out of the thing that killed the man who beat Fry, which is a lot of thematic freight for a sight gag and the show does not underline it once. Fry, being Fry, then feels sorry for the cloned herd and lets them out, and they are immediately killed by traffic. Extinct again, within a scene, by his own kindness.
Farnsworth pivots to lab-grown meat off the same DNA and launches a cruelty-free venture on the back of it, and this is where the episode’s satire gets its teeth into the actual present rather than a 1993 blockbuster. Then the contamination happens. Something in the sequence goes wrong and what comes out of the vat is a humanoid made of sausage that is, functionally, Brocky J alive again. The show has resurrected the dead man twice by this point, once as a cow and once as himself, and neither time did anybody ask for it.
The contest gets revived to match, and the ending is the reason the episode works. The creature is in visible agony partway through, and Fry, given a clear run at the win he has wanted for a thousand years, does not take it. He eats the creature instead, whole, which ends its suffering and wins him the contest at the same time. The announcer treats it as the most selfless act in the history of competitive eating. It is also cannibalism of a sort, and a man finally swallowing the thing he has been unable to digest for a millennium, and the episode lets all three readings sit there without picking one.
“Catfish Hunter” is the lighter half and it knows it. A scammer named Idabelle Sue takes Bender’s grandmother for her life savings, and Bender goes to Mississippi to get it back, which turns into a chain of cons where it is never entirely clear who is working whom. What the episode is actually doing is a straight-faced homage to 1970s Deep South outlaw pictures, all lovable criminals and a corrupt sheriff, and the third act commits to a car chase with real energy behind it. It is a smaller episode than “Beef” and it is not pretending otherwise.
Put the two together and you get a fair picture of what this last full run is going to be. One episode with something genuinely aching under the jokes, one episode that exists because somebody in the room loved “Smokey and the Bandit”. That has been the ratio since 1999 and it is the right ratio. The season ahead promises space pirates, a scam plot, and the return of Dr. Zoidberg’s lost love, and the last episode on the schedule is called “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion”, which is this writing staff being funny about their own situation in the only way they know how.
The thing worth saying plainly is that the show is in good shape on the way out. Twenty-seven years in, with the same eight voices, “Futurama” opened its final full season on an episode about digging something up because the replacement was not good enough, and then had its hero end the resurrection himself. Whether that was deliberate or whether the schedule just landed that way, it is the most on-the-nose thing this series has done in years, and it is also one of the better episodes the Hulu era has produced. Three specials is not nothing. It is also not this.
What Do You Think? Was ending Brocky J by having Fry eat him the right call, or did the show waste a resurrected rival it could have run a whole arc on? Does a season with an expiry date announced before it aired change how you watch it? And after two cancellations and two revivals, do you actually believe three specials is where this ends?
Catch up properly: every Futurama episode in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Simpsons timeline.
See you on the next binge!
