The website “Can’t Get Enough Futurama” has gone black to protest the strange disappearance of the witty and intelligent Matt Groening series Futurama. Fox has consistently treated this gem with disdain, and now the show seems to have been dropped completely after only 5 episodes this year. (Most of these episodes were not even seen on the east coast due to continual football pre-emptions. Why would you schedule a first-run series at 7pm Sunday during football season?) Those episodes, by the way, were from the 3rd and 4th season even though this is the FIFTH season – Fox shows so few each year that they have stopped production of the show with a huge backlog of produced episodes waiting to be aired.
One year ago the Futurama staff was told to go look for new projects as FOX wasn’t ready to order more episodes at that time.
Since then, Futurama won the Emmy for “Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming Less Than One Hour)”, got an Annie Awards nomination for “Outstanding Achievement in an Animated Television Production”, won Rich Moore the “Directing in an Animated Television Production” Annie Award, gave Ken Keeler a WGA Award nomination for “Animation – any length – one airing time” and helped Patric Verrone to win a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Animation Writers Caucus.
Cartoon Network paid $10,000,000 for the rights to rerun Futurama on their Adult Swim block. Great promotion on channels like TNT and CNN, in high profile magazines, on street buses, on radio and even in men’s rooms made Futurama blossom at its 5x a week 11pm time slot and gave Cartoon Network a huge boost in ratings and a solid new fan base ready to make the upcomming DVD set the same success that it was in Europe. In other words: Recognition among TV critics, TV industry professionals and fans is high.
Still, FOX did not yet move to renew Futurama even though “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill” got their nod in January.
On the contrary, FOX effectively hid Futurama from TV by airing no more than 5 episodes with little to no promotion since the start of the season last year and most of these episodes even got the pre-emption treatment throughout the East coast due to its sub-optimal 7pm time slot.
What a waste. We all know what a black hole of lowest common denominator crap Fox is, so I won’t bother insulting your intelligence with a comment like “Fox sucks”.
