Futurama: Watch Planet Express's adventures in release and chronological order

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p>Welcome, Popverse reader, to the world of tomorrow.

Seeing as how the present was pretty, er, grim, I'm happy you've chosen to join us here in the future. It's one of the better possibilities, I have to say - there aren't a ton of zombies, the Maxes are more disappointed than Mad, and to my knowledge, the only Hunger Games are at a fine restaurant called Elzar's. I'm talking, of course, abot the future that is Futurama.

I'm not going to ask how you arrived (time travel is between you and your mad scientist), but while you're here, I want to make sure that your trip is a smooth one. To that end, I've put together this Futurama watch order, which will guide you through the entire sci-fi comedy, whether you want to watch it in release or chronological order. I'll also be answering a couple questions along the way, and even dipping into some universes that aren't Futurama, if the tip is right (Just kidding, you couuldn't afford it. A millenium on, there's still inflation).

Let's begin with a simple question...

How many seasons of Futurama are there?

Google 'Futurama seasons' and you'll find a curious contradiction. Some sources will tell you there are eight seasons, some will tell you there are eleven. Unfortunately for clarity's sake, both are technically correct.

Something that's going to come up a few times over the course of this article is that Futurama has a wild broadcast history. Since its 1999 debut, Futurama has aired on two networks, one streamer, and a handful of direct-to-DVD movies. There's even more messiness beyond the network shennanigans, but we'll get to that later.

For now, what you need to know is that when you go to stream Futurama, you'll probably see a list of eleven seasons. These eleven seasons reflect the broadcast order and the long gaps between episodes, even though (as you'll find out later) a long gap between episodes airing didn't always signify a season break. Still, it's with this arrangement of episodes and specials that you can learn...

How to watch Futurama in release order

The list you'll see below is broken down into those eleven seasons, with the episodes listed by title and in order of broadcast. Keep an eye out for a few specials as we go along, as not every Futurama episode was sent out to the public in the same manner. You'll see what I mean when we get there, but for now, let's start with...

Season One (1999)

On March 28, 1999, the first season of Futurama debuted, introducing the world to everyman Fry, action-oriented space adventurer Leela, alcoholic robot Bender, and so many more. This was the first of five seasons that would air on Fox, home to co-creator Matt Groening's other animated phenomenon, The Simpsons. Fox aired the episodes in this order:

• Space Pilot 3000
• The Series Has Landed
• I, Roommate
• Love's Labours Lost in Space
• Fear of a Bot Planet
• A Fishful of Dollars
• My Three Suns
• A Big Piece of Garbage
• Hell Is Other Robots

Season Two (1999-2000)

A certified hit on their hands, Fox's broadcast of Season Two was 50% longer in episodes than the first. However, viewership dropped in this season, potentially because Fox moved its timeslot. Season Two was aired like this:

• A Flight to Remember
• Mars University
• When Aliens Attack
• Fry and the Slurm Factory
• I Second That Emotion
• Brannigan, Begin Again
• A Head in the Polls
• Xmas Story
• Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?
• Put Your Head on My Shoulders
• The Lesser of Two Evils
• Raging Bender
• A Bicyclops Built for Two
• How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back
• A Clone of My Own
• The Deep South
• Bender Gets Made
• The Problem with Popplers
• Mother's Day
• Anthology of Interest I

Season Three (2000-2001)

Debuting in 2000, Season Three was shorter than its predecessor. By order of boradcast, the episodes went like this:

• The Honking
• War Is the H-Word
• The Cryonic Woman
• Parasites Lost
• Amazon Women in the Mood
• Bendless Love
• The Day the Earth Stood Stupid
• That's Lobstertainment!
• The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz
• The Luck of the Fryrish
• The Cyber House Rules
• Insane in the Mainframe
• Bendin' in the Wind
• Time Keeps on Slippin'
• I Dated a Robot

Season Four (2001-2002)

Season Four revealed something pretty shocking about main character Fry in the episode Roswell that Ends Well (if you know, you know). Watch this season in this order:

• Roswell that Ends Well
• A Tale of Two Santas
• Anthology of Interest II
• Love and Rocket
• Leela's Homeworld
• Where the Buggalo Roam
• A Pharaoh to Remember
• Godfellas
• Future Stock
• A Leela of Her Own
• The 30% Iron Chef
• Where No Fan Has Gone Before

Season Five (2002-2003)

The last to air on Fox, Season Five featured the first of Futurama's 'endings' that weren't, as we'll discuss later on. Watch it like this:

• Crimes of the Hot
• Jurassic Bark
• The Route of All Evil
• A Taste of Freedom
• Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch
• Less than Hero
• Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles
• The Why of Fry
• The Sting
• The Farnsworth Parabox
• Three Hundred Big Boys
• Spanish Fry
• Bend Her
• Obsoletely Fabulous
• Bender Should Not Be Allowed on Television
• The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings

FUTURAMA SPECIAL 1 - Everybody Loves Hypnotoad (2007)

This special episode was released during a hiatus of new Futurama after it left Fox and before it found a home elsewhere, but not on TV. The first of three extras included with a straight-to-DVD film we'll talk about in the 'Season Six' section, Everybody Loves Hypnotoad was an episode of Futurama's show-within-a-show, which had no plot or characters save for an amphibious entity with godlike mind-control powers. The special is 22 minutes of the Hypnotoad and, for some reason, is titled 'Amazon Adventure.'

See why people adore this show?

FUTURAMA SPECIAL 2 - The Lost Adventure (2008)

The second of three DVD extras, The Lost Adventure sees the Planet Express crew team up against the villanous supercapitalist and mad scientist known as Mom. This episode comes with a creator commentary, and if you're wondering why it's animated differently and some of the footage looks like a video game...

Well, stay with us and you'll find out.

Season Six (2008-2009)

Alright, let's finally talk about those Futurama movies.

No new episodes of Futurama aired between September 2003 and March 2008. However, in that time, the Futurama cast, writers, and producers teamed up for four direct-to-DVD Futurama films. Then, when Comedy Central picked up the show, they aired TV edits of these movies as a Sixth Season in the following order:

• Bender's Big Score Part 1
• Bender's Big Score Part 2
• Bender's Big Score Part 3
• Bender's Big Score Part 4
• The Beast with a Billion Backs Part 1
• The Beast with a Billion Backs Part 2
• The Beast with a Billion Backs Part 3
• The Beast with a Billion Backs Part 4
• Bender's Game Part 1
• Bender's Game Part 2
• Bender's Game Part 3
• Bender's Game Part 4
• Into the Wild Green Yonder Part 1
• Into the Wild Green Yonder Part 2
• Into the Wild Green Yonder Part 3
• Into the Wild Green Yonder Part 4

FUTURAMA SPECIAL 3 - Futurama Live! (2010)

To hype up the show's return on a new network, Comedy Central brought together the cast for a live chat with fans, which was then included as the third DVD extra on this list.

Season Seven (2010)

In 2010, Futurama returned for all new episodes with adoptive family Comedy Central. Those fresh episodes, in broadcast order, were:

• Rebirth
• In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela
• Attack of the Killer App
• Proposition Infinity
• The Duh-Vinci Code
• Lethal Inspection
• The Late Philip J. Fry
• That Darn Katz!
• A Clockwork Origin
• The Prisoner of Benda
• Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences
• "he Mutants Are Revolting
• The Futurama Holiday Spectacular

Season Eight (2011)

You can watch the thirteen episodes that streamers call Season Eight in the following order, expecting a cameo from none other than Stephen Hawking:

• Neutopia
• Benderama
• Ghost in the Machines
• Law and Oracle
• The Silence of the Clamps
• Yo Leela Leela
• All the Presidents' Heads
• Möbius Dick
• Fry Am the Egg Man
• The Tip of the Zoidberg
• Cold Warriors
• Overclockwise
• Reincarnation

Season Nine (2012)

Watch Season Nine not for its place in the future - but for how it reflected its present. For one example, the episode Decision 3012 parodied the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. Check out it, and the other episodes od S9, in the following arrangement:

• The Bots and the Bees
• A Farewell to Arms
• Decision 3012
• The Thief of Baghead
• Zapp Dingbat
• The Butterjunk Effect
• The Six Million Dollar Mon
• Fun on a Bun
• Free Will Hunting
• Near-Death Wish
• Viva Mars Vegas
• 31st Century Fox
• Naturama

Season Ten (2013)

The final season to air on Comedy Central, Season Ten looked to fans like it might've really been the end. Of course, it wasn't, but you can still watch it as it was broacast in this order:

• 2-D Blacktop
• Fry and Leela's Big Fling
• T.: The Terrestrial
• Forty Percent Leadbelly
• The Inhuman Torch
• Saturday Morning Fun Pit
• Calculon 2.0
• Assie Come Home
• Leela and the Genestalk
• Game of Tones
• Murder on the Planet Express
• Stench and Stenchibility
• Meanwhile

FUTURAMA SPECIAL 4 - Futrama Live! II (2013)

Sorry for all double numerations here. The second live chat between fans and the cast was done in 2017 to mark Comedy Central's ending of the show.

FUTURAMA SPECIAL 5 - Simpsorama (2014)

This Futurama special episode stands out because, technically, it's not an episode of Futurama. As you can tell by the title, Simpsorama is an episode of The Simpsons; the sixth episode of the Twenty-Sixth Season, to be exact. Not only did it see a melding of two of Matt Groening's greatest contributions to culture, it was also the first time a new Planet Express adventure aired on Fox since its first cancellation.

FUTURAMA SPECIAL 6 - Radiorama (2017)

Three years after Simpsorama put Fry, Leela, & Co. back on Fox, Radiorama saw them in an even more unexpected place: the world of podcasts. Hosted by Chris Hardwick (who also voiced a villain) Radiorama is an audio-only Futurama adventure featuring the original voice cast released as a Nerdist production.

Season Eleven (2023)

Unkillable beast that it is, Futurama was obviously not content going out as a single podcast episode. Thanks to that fact, a devoted fanbase, and perhaps a bit of Hypnotoading, Futurama was once again resurrected - this time by streaming giant Hulu.

Announced as Season Eleven, this latest Futurama adventure began in 2023, and should be viewed in this order:

• The Impossible Stream
• Children of a Lesser Bog
• How The West Was 1010001
• Parasites Regained
• Related to Items You've Viewed
• I Know What You Did Next Xmas
• Rage Against the Vaccine
• Zapp Gets Cancelled
• The Prince and the Product
• All the Way Down

Whew! For a comedy about the future, that was a serious history lesson. It was worth it, of course - if you wanted to view the adventures of the 31st century in the order they were broadcast/streamed, you now have all the info you need. And yet, even this exhaustive list might not be enough for the especially plot-conscious viewer.

You see, there's more than once in the list above that the episodes don't exactly mesh. Watch carefully and you'll see there's an dropped cliffhanger here, an unexplained premise there. Even though (and I'm emphasizing this) Futurama can largely be enjoyed out of order, these small wrinkles could lead the canon-obsessed to wonder...

Is Futurama out of order?

Alright nerds, buckle up. It's time I told you the truth about Futurama.

Let's return to the eight versus eleven seasons debate I told you about earlier. You already know who considers the show to be 11 seasons and I'll tell you who considers it to be eight in just a moment, but before that, let's answer the question: why is there a debate anyway? The reason for that, dear reader, is something that even some decently invested fans don't know, and iit's this:

Futurama was not broadcast in the order it was created.

Here's a Nibbler to help you recover.

Isn't he adorable? Take one last look ere we plunge again into cold truth's fathoms.

When Futurama was ordered to network, the creators wrote it as four seasons. However, Fox wanted to broadcast five, so they not only split those seasons up, but they rearranged the order of the episodes therein.

The confusion continued at Comedy Central. Though the episodes stayed in the order they were written, large gaps appeared mid-seasons, leading later streamers to demarcate the halves as separate seasons entirely. Then, when one of those streamers (Hulu) picked uup the show for its own, it chose to number the seasons not by their creators' intent... but by broacast.

So what does this mean for you? It means that, if you've ever only streamed the show, you have been viewing the series in a way the creators did not originally intend. What you viewed as Season Five was originally the latter half of Season Four. What you viewed as Season was originally the first half of Season Seven. What you viewed as Season Eleven was actually Season Eight.

Now, if these numbers are making your head hurt as much as mine is as I write this, you can turn back now. There's no shame in it - close this article, start at Season One, and let autoplay carry you to salvation. But if that's not enough for you, if you seek to experience Futurama the way in which it was created, you're going to need a different list. You're going to need to know...

How to watch Futurama in chronological order

Wow! You're still reading, huh? Impressive. I'll be honest, I'm getting a little sick of this article and I'm the one actually getting paid for it. But since you're sticking it through, I'll try to do the same.

After a not-inconsiderable amount of internal debate, I finally decided on the most simple way to present this list to you without spending time on explanations like I did earlier. And, with my sincere apologies to both you and my editors, I believe that way is to simply list out the episodes in the order they were produced.

Don't worry, though, I'll still break the list up by marking where each season was originally intended to begin and end. Surely that will make this whole thing a little easier, right?

No, I don't actually think so either, but I'm doing my best. Here we go...

Season One

• Space Pilot 3000
• The Series Has Landed
• I, Roommate
• Love's Labours Lost in Space
• Fear of a Bot Planet
• A Fishful of Dollars
• My Three Suns
• A Big Piece of Garbage
• Hell Is Other Robots
• A Flight to Remember
• Mars University
• When Aliens Attack
• Fry and the Slurm Factory

Season Two

• I Second that Emotion
• Brannigan, Begin Again
• A Head in the Polls
• Xmas Story
• Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?
• The Lesser of Two Evils
• Put Your Head on My Shoulders
• Raging Bender
• A Bicyclops Built for Two
• A Clone of My Own
• How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back
• The Deep South
• Bender Gets Made
• Mother's Day
• The Problem with Popplers
• Anthology of Interest I
• War Is the H-Word
• The Honking
• The Cryonic Woman

Season Three

• Amazon Women in the Mood
• Parasites Lost
• A Tale of Two Santas
• The Luck of the Fryrish
• The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz
• Bendless Love
• The Day the Earth Stood Stupid
• That's Lobstertainment!
• The Cyber House Rules
• Where the Buggalo Roam
• Insane in the Mainframe
• The Route of All Evil
• Bendin' in the Wind
• Time Keeps on Slippin'
• I Dated a Robot
• A Leela of Her Own
• A Pharaoh to Remember
• Anthology of Interest II
• Roswell that Ends Well
• Godfellas
• Future Stock
• The 30% Iron Chef

Season Four

• Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch
• Leela's Homeworld
• Love and Rocket
• Less than Hero
• A Taste of Freedom
• Bender Should Not Be Allowed on Television
• Jurassic Bark
• Crimes of the Hot
• Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles
• The Why of Fry
• Where No Fan Has Gone Before
• The Sting
• Bend Her
• Obsoletely Fabulous
• The Farnsworth Parabox
• Three Hundred Big Boys
• Spanish Fry
• The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings

Season Five - The Futurama Movies/DVD Extras

• Bender's Big Score
• FUTURAMA SPECIAL 1 - Everybody Loves Hypnotoad
• The Beast with a Billion Backs
• FUTURAMA SPECIAL 2 - The Lost Adventure
• Bender's Game
• Into the Wild Green Yonder

Season Six

• FUTURAMA SPECIAL 3 - Futurama Live!
• Rebirth
• In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela
• Attack of the Killer App
• Proposition Infinity
• The Duh-Vinci Code
• Lethal Inspection
• The Late Philip J. Fry
• That Darn Katz!
• A Clockwork Origin
• The Prisoner of Benda
• Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences
• The Mutants Are Revolting
• The Futurama Holiday Spectacular
• The Silence of the Clamps
• Möbius Dick
• Law and Oracle
• Benderama
• The Tip of the Zoidberg
• Ghost in the Machines
• Neutopia
• Yo Leela Leela
• Fry Am the Egg Man
• All the Presidents' Heads
• Cold Warriors
• Overclockwise
• Reincarnation

Season Seven

• The Bots and the Bees
• A Farewell to Arms
• Decision 3012
• The Thief of Baghead
• Zapp Dingbat
• The Butterjunk Effect
• The Six Million Dollar Mon
• Fun on a Bun
• Free Will Hunting
• Near-Death Wish
• 31st Century Fox
• Viva Mars Vegas
• Naturama
• Forty Percent Leadbelly
• 2-D Blacktop
• T.: The Terrestrial
• Fry and Leela's Big Fling
• The Inhuman Torch
• Saturday Morning Fun Pit
• Calculon 2.0
• Assie Come Home
• Leela and the Genestalk
• Game of Tones
• Murder on the Planet Express
• Stench and Stenchibility
• Meanwhile
• FUTURAMA SPECIAL 4 - Futrama Live! II

Outside Seasons

• FUTURAMA SPECIAL 5 - Simpsorama
• FUTURAMA SPECIAL 6 - Radiorama

Season Eight

• The Impossible Stream
• Children of a Lesser Bog
• How The West Was 1010001
• Parasites Regained
• Related to Items You've Viewed
• I Know What You Did Next Xmas
• Rage Against the Vaccine
• Zapp Gets Cancelled
• The Prince and the Product
• All the Way Down

Good heavens, you've made it to the end! With the episodes watched in this order, a much stronger canon or sense of a timeline emerges from the still fairly episodic TV series. Like the space-faring travels of the Futarama cast themselves, your journey was dangerous and long, but you made it to the finish.

Which is why I am so, so sorry to point out that, even watching them in this order, you'll find that there's still one problem with the Futurama plot. That is, that it keeps ending.

How many times has Futurama ended?

Ok, there's oneshould clarify here: Futurama has not ended. It is very much still ongoing (more on that at the bottom of this article. However, what has happened several times is that Futurama has changed homes, and proceeding each of those changes was a "wrap up" episode and/or movie to effectively close out the show if it didn't come back. Here are those 'endings' that just didn't stick:

• The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings - The title card, which displays a different message every episode, reads "See You on Some Other Channel" in this last Fox-produced episode of Futurama.<
• Into the Wild Green Yonder (Part 4) - Unsure of whether Futurama would return to TV, the writers of this straight-to-DVD movie left the ending open. Later, it was broadcast on Comedy Central and the story was directly followed up by the first episode of Season Seven.
• Meanwhile - This finale to Comedy Central's run of the show was the closest to being its last so far; a full decade would pass before the Planet Express crew were once again on original adventures aired on television.

Now, let me point something out here. You as the Futurama binger might choose to let one of these endings stick, especially if it's one you're happy with. There's nothing wrong with choosing to stop watching a show, after all. In fact, you might want to at least use these endings as much-needed breaks in your viewing; there's quite a lot of Futurama out there, so much so that to count their cumulative hours would take an absolute crazy person.

Like me.

How long would it take to watch all of Futurama?

Thankfully, each episode of Futurama is just about 22 minutes in length, including the episodes that were oiginally made as direct-to-DVD movies. With that in mind, I simply counted up the total number of episodes, then added the specials (also 22 minutes) and wound up with 3,432 minutes or fifty-seven hours and twelve minutes.

Not that hard to come to, actually. But I'd still advise against watching it in one sitting. On to the next question...

Are the Futurama video games canon?

Since the show debuted, two video games have featured the Planet Express crew. The latter of those was Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow, which tasks a player with rebuilding the universe after hypnotoad pulls apart spacetime in an attempt to mate (I mean, who of us hasn't?). While the events of Worlds of Tomorrow are never mentioned in the show, it did come with an animated gameplay trailer featuring the voice cast. If that's enough for you to define as 'canon,' then canon it is, official status be damned.

But it's the former game, simply called Futurama, that we know for a fact is canon. In fact, the cutscenes of the Futurama game make up the episode Futurama: The Lost Adventure, which we mentioned before. Watch it as a between-networks adventure like the other Futurama movies - in fact, the only way to view it is as a special on the Beast with a Billion Backs DVD.

Is Disenchantment Connected to Futurama?

We've already talked about a Matt Groening crossover with Simpsorama, so it's only natural to wonder whether his Netflix-owned fantasy romp also overlaps with the 31st century gang. And I'm thrilled to inform you that the answer is yes.

In the episode The Late Philip J. Fry, Professor Farnsworth takes Bender and Fry on a journey through time, during which they watch human history from its beginning to end to another beginning. As time whips by them on fast forward, we briefly see not one but two Middle Ages, complete with the same castle and carriage aesthetic that colors Disenchantment. By itself, this image is meaningless; who's to say that this isn't just the real Middle Ages, repeated for comedy's sake?

Matt Groening, that's who.

In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment from Disenchantment Season One, Episode Ten, a couple of ne'er-do-wells obtain their own means of watching through history: a magic crystal ball. The ball projects holographic images of the past and present into a room and, for the briefest moment, one of those images just happens to be a genius, an idiot, and a robot in a time machine.

Where do I watch Futurama?

Like the owls of the 31st Century, Futurama pops up just about everywhere these days, so it's hard to know exactly where to go. For example, you can find a handful of episodes on Fubo, Comedy Central, and FXNow. However, if you want to watch all of the show (and why wouldn't you?), you're going to have to scrounge up a Hulu account. This is especially true for Season Eleven, which is the only season exclusive to the streamer.

As you can imagine, finding the Futurama specials are a little bit more difficult, but here's what you need to know:

• Like I already mentioned, The Lost Adventure is a DVD extra from the Beast with a Billion Backs. Similarly, owners of a DVD copy of Bender's Big Score can watch Everybody Loves Hypnotoad.
• You'll need to stream The Simpsons on Disney+ to watch Simpsorama, and you can listen to Radiorama on Spotify.
• The trickest Futurama specials to track down are Futurama Live! I and II. While I could not find a link to either of them, I did manage to scrounge up a live reading of a Futurama episode (Proposition Infinity) on Futurama's Facebook page, which should give you a sense of what the cast's chat with fans was like. But to find the actual Futurama Live(s)!, I'm afraid it's going to take more time than I had to spend.

On the bright side, however, that quest is something to fill time as you wonder the question that's probably been on your mind since you got to the end of our first list...

Is Futurama coming back?

If there were ever any doubts in your mind that there would be more Futurama, the above section on 'endings' should have been those to rest. Yes, Futurama will again be gracing our screens as early as this year, according to Deadline. Beyond that, Hulu has put in another order for a 20-episode batch, carrying the show to at least Season Fourteen.

And what's after that? Well, we in the 31st Century are still about a thousand years away from the present you're reading this in. There's plenty of time for new Futurama in between then.