Good news everybody! Futurama to return

In the last day, it's been announced that my favorite tv show ever, Futurama, is to be revived and another series made. Listening to the commentaries on the DVDsets of the show, it seems that from as early as the 3rd episode in, the Fox executives didn't like it.
The show premiered in 1999 and told the story of Philip J Fry, a 20 something loser from New York, who was accidentally cryogenically frozen untill the year 2999. He eventually finds his distant reletive, Hubert Farnsworth - a 159 year old inventor who runs a delivery service. Initially, the show generated a lot of controversy over the characters of Bender and Hermes Conrad. Hermes was alleged to be a racist stereotype of Jamacans whilst Bender was an antihero - he stole, drank, gambled and smoked. Show creators Matt Greoning and David X Cohen brushed it off by saying that the show asn't aimed at the same age group as The Simpsons.
Whilst Futurama is based 1000 years in the future, most of the comedy revolves around the fact that things haven't really changed. Certain things are given a slight futuristic twist (for example in the future, owls have replaced rats as vermin) Celebrities from today are kept alive as heads in jars allowing the usual culture references. In the first episode we are introduced to the suicide booth - a telephone kiosk esque device that aids suicides. Instead of the legend of Atlantis, we are told of the legend of Atlanta - the state which was transported to sea and then sank. Most of the writers of Futurama hold PhDs or masters degrees in mathematics and science and this has lead to a large range of nerd jokes that geeks like me can pick up on. For example in one episode a horse race is so close they have to examine the photo finish on the electron microscope to which Farnsworth angrily exclaims "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it" citing Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and in another Bender launches a dating agency that is "dicreet and discrete". Some of the jokes are sogeeky that I only got them once I'd heard the commentry track - for example, Bender's apartment number means something in ASCII and one of the alien alphabets is a modular addition code after fans cracked the first one within minutes of the first episode airing.
The main reason the show is so repected by it's fans is that, like Scrubs, it can turn from comedy to drama at the drop of a hat. Episodes such as Luck of the Fryrish and Jurassic Bark have the most perfect, heart-breaking endings that shows like the Simpsons just can't even dream of producing. Groening and Cohen had also mapped out some long plot arcs that were very subtley put into place as soon as the first episode and then had hidden references made several times before they were revealed in the last season (hint - look at the shadow on the floor underneath the desk every time we see Fry fall into the cryogentic compartment). This kind of foresight implies that they had a lot more ideas, but unfortunately cancellation meant that most of them had to be quickly resolved in the 4th season.
The sad thing is that, The Simpsons used to be the best show on television, but soon became more and more wacky (exactly the kind of thing that could be rationalised in Futurama) and less and less witty over time. Futurama was screwed over by Fox who moved it around the schedules and often sports games overran episodes meaning some episodes couldn't be seen in some states. It was picked up for syndication by the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim channel (that also picked up Family Guy and Ghost in the Shell: SAC) and proved to be the most popular thing on the channel - often beating what Fox was showing. It was announced that a series of straight to DVD movies would be made and today the announcement of another run of 13 shows was made. Unfortunately, they won't air until 2008, but hopefully the movies should arrive before that. For all things Futurama, head over to Can't get enough Futurama.