Futurama is back thanks to Hulu, and we finally have a trailer to give us a taste of the show’s first new episodes in a decade. Unfortunately, season 11 already feels behind the times, even though the new season isn’t out for another month.
The trailer still has the kind of silly slapstick and ridiculous comedy Futurama is full of, like Bender disintegrating someone immediately after a battle ends, or Bender making a donkey dig out of a locked room. But the trailer also has quite a few jokes that feel like they were frozen sometime early last year and now thawed while barely clinging to relevance.
There’s a joke about visiting a lawless corner of space known as Crypto Country, and jokes about a pandemic and nasal swabs that Zoidberg says they’ll have to use hundreds of times. Not only do these jokes feel old, irrelevant, and played out, they aren’t particularly funny either.
The good news is, all things that make Futurama great don’t really fit in a trailer. At best, Futurama is a show that thrives on fantastic locations for episodes, something you can’t really show off in a two-minute preview. But to know for sure how season 11 will play out, we’ll have to wait for the show to arrive on Hulu on July 26. The series will stream one episode a week for the entire 10-episode season 11 run, and will be followed by season 12 sometime in the future.