One of the greatest animated series of our generation, Futurama, returned to television last night?  So how was it?  I thought it was pretty damn funny.  Yay – Futurama is back!

I really do think that Futurama rounds out my top 3 “best cartoons ever” list, with the other two obviously being The Simpsons and South Park.  No offense to Family Guy – they definitely have had their funny moments – but FG just has not been consistently amazing like The Simpsons, South Park, and Futurama.  (Sure, those 3 have had their lows, too, but even a bad Simpsons episode is better than a so-so Family Guy.)

Anyway, the Futurama DVD movies were not especially amazing.  Sure, they had some quotable and memorable moments, but overall, the stories just didn’t feel like “classic” Futurama, and I argued that straddling the line between being one movie and four separate episodes just didn’t work.  So when I heard that the show was coming back again, this time in it’s tried and true 30 minute episode format, I was giddy.

And as last night’s episodes showed, this brilliant series still has legs.  They wrote off the black hole ending of Into the Wild Green Yonder in the first episode back, but they did keep the continuity going of the aftermath of their crash landing on Earth, and the way the episode was told using flashbacks worked to great effect.  Actually, they used the flashback device again in the second episode, but they were both done so well, it didn’t bother me.  I once again felt like some of the deeper Fry-Leela stuff was glossed over (Why can’t they be together now?  Why doesn’t Fry step in when Zapp is hitting on Leela?), but the show was full of jokes and sight gags, clever math problems, silly throw away lines, Bender being Bender, memorable and quotable lines, and everything we’ve come to expect from Futurama.  It may be 7 years too late, but at long last, Futurama is back on TV, and back to its old form.