Good news, everyone! Futurama is back for season 12.
It’s been a long, strange journey to get here: Matt Groening’s follow-up to The Simpsons premiered in 1999 on Fox, where it lasted for four seasons before getting canceled. Futurama was then revived as four straight-to-DVD movies — Bender’s Big Score, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender’s Game, and Into the Wild Green Yonder — which later aired on Comedy Central, where the show was rescued and aired from 2008 until 2013. The series was saved again in 2023 by Hulu, and “Hulurama” has already been renewed through season 14.
But for now, let’s stick to season 12. Here’s everything you need to know about the new batch of episodes, including plot details and the premiere date.
Plot
Last season, Fry, Leela, Bender, & Co. took on an Amazon-like company formed by Mom; caught a rage virus; and get turned into toys (that was a weird one). In season 12 (which is technically the second half of season eight if you go by production codes, but let’s stick with Hulu’s season designations for the sake of ease), the gang “embarks on mind-bending adventures involving birthday party games to the death, the secrets of Bender’s ancestral robot village, A.I. friends (and enemies), impossibly cute beanbags, and the true 5 million-year-old story behind the consciousness-altering substance known as coffee,” according to the plot synopsis provided by the streamer.
There’s also more about Fry and Leela’s relationship.
Fry and Leela are currently living together (and were even briefly married), something the writers thought would never happen. “Oh, we’ll have Fry be this idiot, and he has a crush on Leela, he wants to win Leela’s love, but we didn’t take it that seriously because we just thought, oh, Fry’s a moron, he has no chance,” exeuctive producer David X. Cohen explained back in 2014.
Fry is an inspiration to morons (me) everywhere.
Cast
The whole Planet Express crew is back, including Billy West as Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Zoidberg, and Zapp Brannigan; John DiMaggio (who held out for better pay until “there was also nowhere for me to go”) as Bender; Katey Sagal as Leela; Phil LaMarr as Hermes; and Lauren Tom as Amy. The voice cast also features Tress MacNeille as Mom; Maurice LaMarche as Kif, Morbo, and Calculon; and David Herman as Scruffy. No guest stars have been announced yet.
Release Date
Season 12 of Futurama will premiere on July 29 on Hulu, followed by new episodes every Monday until the season finale.
Trailer
As a sucker for watching voice actors perform their characters, I very much enjoyed the first look at Futurama season 12.
