The 11th-season finale of Matt Groening’s animated sci-fi comedy Futurama airs on September 28. It’s the show’s 180th episode. If Futurama were a broad comedy series airing in the 1960s, like Get Smart or Hogan’s Heroes, this might be around the time the show would be ending with a complete lack of ceremony. If Futurama were a sitcom from the ’70s or ’80s, it might also be reasonably expected to be wrapping up at this point, and would probably attempt to provide some degree of closure in the process. Instead, Futurama will sign off in a manner befitting both its own peculiar stop-start history and the multiple time periods it has traversed since its 1999 debut. In the process, it has become better at ending than almost any show before it.
It almost had to, given how frequently it ends. “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion” is, without giving too much away, the final regular episode of the show’s 40-episode run on Hulu; a possible final regular episode of the show overall (which in this case is distinct from a series finale); a meditation on the nature of a satisfying ending; and very much not the last we’ll see of Futurama as a property, since Hulu has given the greenlight for three specials to air throughout 2027. Moreover, it is at least the fourth time the series has reached its terminus, depending on how you count it.
Futurama is not the only show to experience this cycle of death and rebirth during the last 27 years. When the first direct-to-DVD movie Futurama movie was released in 2007, it was a relative novelty for a cult favorite to return from the cancellation graveyard—it was only two years prior that DVD sales and rerun ratings convinced Fox to bring back Futurama’s former networkmate and fellow Adult Swim staple Family Guy. Since then, the advent of streaming and broadcasters’ inability to make it 1997 again through science or magic have led to plenty of shows getting the revival treatment, which in turn often leads to another finale when those revivals inevitably end. With today’s scripted TV programming running for fewer seasons and subject to the itchy trigger fingers of streaming bean counters, the traditional, much-anticipated, thoughtfully considered, and narratively definitive series finale as we’ve long understood it represents an increasingly outmoded middle ground between the abrupt non-endings of the past and an eternal progression of ellipses leading into our future. All of these options are still possible; none of them are assured even for well-loved shows.
Yet even by these new, slippery standards, the sheer number of Futurama finales is still impressively unusual. The series originally ended with season four’s “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings,” in which unfrozen 20th-century goofball Fry sells his human hands to The Robot Devil so that he might become a musical prodigy and earn the love of his 31st-century mutant crush, Leela. It wasn’t a guaranteed finale at the time, but it was also 72 episodes into a mostly low-rated run, so the writing was likely on the wall. Into The Wild Green Yonder, the fourth and final DVD movie, sends the main Planet Express crew hurtling toward a wormhole, and an unknown future in terms of physics as well as episode counts. “Meanwhile,” the end of the two Comedy Central seasons made possible by the movies (which were, to make matters more convoluted, re-edited for cable as the show’s fifth season), ricochets from a miniature time loop to a paused universe where Fry and Leela marry and grow old together, then receive the opportunity to re-join the world as they left it, without memory of what they’ve just shared—a potential the couple is tantalized by once more in the first season finale of the Hulu run, “Otherwise.”
The upcoming “Final Ending,” however, prefers a more playfully analytical approach, with a series of smaller stories-within-stories, predicated on the idea of interruption and the urgent desire to know how a narrative ends. It’s not quite so bold as to create an infinite nesting doll, but it does tease the idea of leaving some of its lead characters hanging once again. As a standalone finale, it could come across as flip, especially compared to “Meanwhile” or fan fave “The Devil’s Hands.” Its cleverness is frontloaded, giving way to more standard self-referentiality and winks at its own narrative contrivances.
In general, there’s something theoretically frustrating about the steady stream of Futurama endings, particularly now that they seem to arrive every 20 or 30 episodes. In another age of TV production, that would be akin to crafting a series wrap-up every season. Now it’s an accelerated version of the common practice where shows on the bubble might make dual-use season finales that would satisfy fans as a last look just as easily as they might lead into a whole new season. Chuck and Parks And Recreation, among others, come to mind. (Oh, the capriciousness of 2010s-era NBC!)
These repeated insurance policies can become wearying in the aggregate: Just cautious enough to impede a show’s creative progress with possible escape hatches, yet not quite fully dedicated to the task of committing to those possible endings. Futurama’s “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion” is of a piece with that technique, not least because while additional regular episodes may or may not happen, those further Hulu specials are already in the pipeline. In that context, it’s the ultimate hedged bet of a “last” episode, right down to its satirically redundant title.
At the same time, one of the reasons “Final Ending” plays both minor in the moment and better in the grand scheme of the series is that Futurama has been allowed that unusual space to end several times, relieving the absurd pressures that often accompany more proper modern finales. One likely advantage is that all of these episodes share the same writer, longtime staffer Ken Keeler, lending them a certain sense of continuity between Keeler’s thematic interests as well as, more practically, a presumably decent memory for how past endings were approached and, as such, ideas for how future iterations might differ. Put together, these installments have the intentionality of a good finale and the playfulness of a strong individual episode. The accumulation of Futurama finales starts to feel modular, in a way that pairs well with the show’s what-if conceits about a far-flung future. Like suicide-booth customers or patients of the M*A*S*H-skewering iHawk doctor, viewers have options. They can choose Futurama wrap-ups that are bittersweet, open-ended, jokey, or a philosophical treatise on the enduring nature of love and the fleeting yet wondrous qualities of time. If the most recent finale isn’t to your liking, just slide forward or backward in time, whether via one of the previous episodes or a forthcoming special.
At first, this might seem like a creative offshoot of the Forever Franchises that have overtaken so much of media in the 21st century: Marvel, Star Wars, infinite Harry Potters where TV shows copy movies that attempted to slavishly recreate books so that everything matches the theme parks. And maybe to some degree Futurama is indulging that tendency, alongside a sci-fi-fantasy flexibility that, say, Parks And Recreation couldn’t count as a luxury. But consider Matt Groening’s other long-running animated show, The Simpsons. That show has never really had to think about a potential series finale since its first season, beyond the occasional what-if flash-forward that seems like a bid for greater time-passage resonance, any number of format-breakers that make viewers point out that they could have served as a fine finale in retrospect, or results of “What are they going to do, fire us?” senioritis on the part of departing staffers like “Cape Feare.” There’s also the phenomenon of particularly fussy fans’ choices for the last really good episode that can serve as their personal jumping-off point as part of a fantasy where the show never makes it past season 20, 15, nine, eight, three, whatever. The Simpsons enjoys a unique no-pressure ease that can also, as it lumbers toward a monumental 900-episode mark, feel like a form of stasis—like a middle-aged friend who has somehow avoided ever contemplating death as anything more than the most remote hypothetical. (Is that the long-term difference between Homer and Fry, similar as they are in doofus-dom? Fry has looked mortality in the face, however incompetently; Homer has been ignoring it for seasons on end.)
Futurama, as less of a cultural juggernaut than its creative cousin, has found a way around that problem without succumbing to the pressures of the more traditional series finale, where fans hope for the world and creators hope to give it to them. In its absurd, reality-bending way, Futurama more closely captures the series of finales that make up life. There are episodes that attempt to sum up the characters’ existence while still getting laughs; the latest one attempts to examine the possibly irrational but near-universal desire for closure through a cheerful cosmic joke. Things end gracefully, keep going unexpectedly, and circle back to other endings we could have anticipated but still aren’t prepared for. It’s the perfect cross-section between television—a medium that didn’t coin the term “rerun,” but certainly redefined and supercharged it—and life. This series of intentionally imperfect endings has allowed Futurama to stay ahead of its time.
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