Futurama season 14 Trailer: Good news, everyone, the future is still Completely Bonkers (trailer)
Good news, everyone! Futurama has returned from the dead again, although by this stage it would be more surprising if it remained peacefully buried.
The new Comic-Con trailer for the show’s fourteenth season promises swaggering space pirates, laboratory-grown meat, romantic confidence tricks and the return of Dr Zoidberg’s lost love. Presumably someone has checked whether she was actually lost, rather than simply hiding behind a moon until he stopped calling.
The animated science-fiction comedy returns on 3 August 2026, bringing Fry, Leela, Bender and the Planet Express crew back for another collection of deliveries that will almost certainly violate several interplanetary safety regulations before lunchtime.
Created by Matt Groening and developed with David X. Cohen, Futurama first appeared in 1999. It began with pizza delivery boy Philip J. Fry accidentally freezing himself on New Year’s Eve and waking up a thousand years later, where he discovered that humanity had conquered space without making customer service noticeably better.
Since then, the programme has survived cancellation, resurrection, another cancellation, several films, further resurrection and enough changes of broadcaster to make its television listings resemble a witness protection programme. Most series would regard one cancellation as a firm suggestion. Futurama treats them as short tea breaks.
Season fourteen finds the future becoming stranger, which is quite an achievement in a universe already containing robot devils, sewer mutants, disembodied celebrity heads and a crustacean doctor whose medical qualifications appear to have been printed on the back of a takeaway menu.
The trailer promises space pirates with swagger. Ordinary space pirates are apparently no longer enough. Today’s interstellar criminal must stride confidently onto the bridge, steal the cargo and leave behind a QR code linking to their personal brand consultancy.
There will also be lab-grown meat, which sounds like precisely the sort of subject Futurama enjoys taking from the present day, feeding through an atomic exaggerator and serving back to us wearing tentacles. The series has always been particularly good at using the year 3000 to point and laugh at the year we actually inhabit.
Its future may contain faster-than-light spacecraft and sentient robots, but people are still foolish, corporations are still dreadful and every promising new technology eventually becomes a method of selling something embarrassing. Science advances. Human nature gets comfortable on the sofa and refuses to move.
“Sexy scams” are also on the menu this season. This could mean romance fraud involving shapeshifting aliens, seductive robots or Bender placing a wig over his antenna and introducing himself as Duchess Bendérina of Monaco. Whatever form it takes, somebody will lose their savings and possibly an internal organ.
The more startling development is the return of Dr Zoidberg’s lost love. Zoidberg has occasionally found romance before, but happiness tends to escape from him with the speed and determination of a diner leaving a restaurant after seeing him emerge from the kitchen.
It is hard not to feel some affection for the unfortunate Decapodian. He is permanently hungry, catastrophically poor and employed as a doctor despite knowing less about human anatomy than the average deckchair. Yet he endures. Perhaps love really can bloom in the wasteland, assuming it has had the correct vaccinations.
The familiar voice cast is returning, including Billy West as Fry, Professor Farnsworth and Zoidberg, Katey Sagal as Leela and John DiMaggio as Bender. Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman are also aboard, presumably having signed the standard Planet Express employment contract absolving management of responsibility for death, dismemberment or transformation into decorative furniture.
For all its absurdity, Futurama has always carried a surprising emotional charge beneath the metalwork. One episode will feature Bender stealing something from God, while the next will quietly dismantle the viewer’s heart using an elderly dog or a message sent across a thousand years.
That combination of hard science-fiction ideas, gloriously stupid jokes and occasional emotional ambushes is why the series keeps returning. It can make a gag about binary numbers, follow it with Zoidberg eating rubbish from a bin and somehow finish by saying something painful about loneliness.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we have begun to suspect that Futurama cannot actually be cancelled. It merely enters a dormant state, buried beneath streaming contracts until cultural conditions become favourable and somebody shouts John DiMaggio’s name into a bathroom mirror.
The decision to call this Season 14 may cause mild confusion among viewers using alternative production numbering, but that is entirely appropriate. In the future, even counting television series has become a branch of theoretical physics.
New episodes will arrive weekly, restoring the traditional seven-day period in which fans can analyse every obscure equation, alien cameo and background joke before the internet announces that the following episode has destroyed the entire canon.
Three extended Futurama specials have also been commissioned, with the first expected to bring Xmas chaos in 2027. In the thirty-first century, of course, Xmas means Robot Santa Claus descending from Neptune to punish almost everyone for being naughty. It remains one of the few festive traditions capable of making a family argument over Monopoly seem soothing.
Futurama Season 14 begins streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ internationally on 3 August 2026.
The future is strange, the meat is growing in a laboratory and Zoidberg may finally be getting a girlfriend.
What could possibly go wrong?
