13. Futurama – I still can’t believe that we’re living in a world where there are new Futurama episodes. It’s been a long time since FOX cancelled the series, and while the DVD movies were pretty great, it’s a whole other matter to have the actual series back on the air. This has long been one of my favorite shows, and the new batch of episodes stands up to the original run. The mind-bending plots are back, like “The Late Philip J. Fry” which involved a time machine that could only move forward and showed us the end of the universe twice. There was the funny and sweet “Lethal Inspection” which gave us a rare team-up of Bender and Hermes and revealed a shared history between the two. And the Fry/Leela relationship is steadily developing, rather than resetting at the end of every episode as in the original run. Since the series wrapped up so well the first time, and the movies delivered satisfying stories that resolved so much of the mythology, I’d more or less made my peace with the idea that Futurama was over. Every episode now feels like a special gift from Comedy Central to me.
