“I’m leaning in to see if any of those Pop! figures behind you are Futurama,” David X. Cohen begins via Zoom. “Okay, you’re all right,” he adds after spotting a few.

The Futurama executive producer and showrunner has plenty of collectables from the series behind him, including a life-size Bender.

“The Bender has a good story,” Cohen shares. “It dates back to the days of records. Like, vinyl records, 1999, when we premiered. The record store, Tower Records, which used to exist and it was a big chain in the U.S., they also had VHS tapes and stuff, so they had displays of Futurama stuff in the record stores, and they made these giant Benders for Tower Records displays, and they let us buy a few extras for the office, which I stole.”

Bender and the rest of Planet Express are back for season 12, following the show’s revival last year. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a year or a decade between new episodes, when you sit down to watch Futurama, it feels like almost no time has passed.

“It’s funny that you say that, because that’s exactly how I feel when we’re making the show,” Cohen tells. “We could be off for five years, ten years in this most recent case, and the first day I sit down like, ‘Okay, here we go.’ It always does feel like it was only about three days ago that we last did it. It’s really built into my consciousness at this point, and my regular life is making the show.

“But just as far as why it lives… first of all, just being science fiction, it meant we never had to write something that became instantly dated. We were never writing about life in 1999 specifically, but just about these more general fears and concerns that human beings have, and then placing the ones that we’re having that day in a slightly different framing in the future.

‘The One Amigo’, Season 12

“So, if there’s some kind of protest going on in Los Angeles, well we can make it robots protesting in the year 3000, and then you’ll never quite know what inspired us originally, in some cases. And you don’t immediately go, ‘Oh, that’s 15 years old.’ So, I think the science fiction angle is the number one thing that has saved us from people noticing how much time has passed. It was never that clear what year we were writing.

“And then, just as far as the show returning, I always say that each time a new medium of television is invented, that’s when we come back and our tech-savvy fans are waiting at the next medium. DVDs replacing broadcast TV originally, then cable TV, and now streaming TV. So, our tech-savvy fans are always the first ones eagerly waiting on the new platform.”

Even when the show is referencing a specific moment in pop culture, as it does with Squid Game in season 12, it’s done in such a way that it won’t feel dated as soon as the popularity of the Netflix series is done.

“That’s the goal because, yeah, we don’t have Fry say, ‘Oh, there was this TV show, Squid Game, and I want to do something…’ We just say, ‘This is happening and if you get the reference, you do, and if you forget the reference a few years from now, then we get full credit for having just created the whole idea.’ So that’s fine. Wait a few more years and people will go like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Futurama‘s original idea,’ and we’ll hog all the credit for it,” he jokes.

The episode in question is Quids Game, which revisits Fry’s childhood; a time and place that’s inherently loaded with emotion.

‘The Luck of the Fryrish’, Season 3

“I really like when we try something touching with the episodes, like the end of that second episode this year you’re talking about, I do think the ending came out kind of touching. And Fry is a natural character for that. Really, time travel and future stuff is, even though it sounds kind of crazy, it actually always has this emotional thing built into it, which is that if you move into the future, you leave a lot of stuff behind you. There’s a tragedy to it that there’s this life you can’t go back to, Fry can’t go back. But that sort of represents, in a small way, how none of us can revisit things from our past that we miss.

“I think that it’s automatically kind of touching when you see Fry’s old life because you know it’s gone forever. As far as writing it, it’s gotten somewhat harder because we’ve written a bunch of stuff before and you don’t want to contradict it. So, we have a narrower and narrower path. But I was happy with how that came out.

“For people who try to put it together, he has a friend at that birthday party. Very, very obscure side character named Josh Gedgie, who’s sort of his arch rival in a different flashback from an earlier episode when Fry was older. So, that’s an example of how we’re trying to piece things together in this timeline in retrospect.”

Some of the show’s best episodes involve flashbacks to Fry’s past, including one of Cohen’s favourites, The Luck of the Fryrish, or the universally adored heartbreaker Jurassic Bark. Despite both of those cementing themselves in not only animation history but pop culture as a whole, the showrunner admits they weren’t originally sure they could pull off episodes such as those.

“Now we know we can, because we’ve done a few and they were well received, but if you go back to Luck of the Fryrish, that was the first one where we were really like, ‘We’re going to try something that’s genuinely touching. We don’t know if we can do this in a goofy sci-fi cartoon.’ And so, at that time we had no idea. We thought it might be the most hated episode. We had no idea. But it ended up being popular and I think we learned a lot of lessons from that.

‘The One Amigo’, Season 12

“And one of them that I always think of in sort of a mathematical sense, almost, is that I think of there being three axis that we’re writing on: less funny or more funny is one of them, another one is more emotional or less emotional, or just goofy to seriously emotional, and the third one is sort of the sci-fi action angle.

“And you can turn those all up and down independently. Which, again, at first, we weren’t that sure of. And I think we keep finding that whatever combination you try is possible, it just can be a lot of work.”

Cohen adds that he’s most proud when the sad episode works because he feels like it’s a sign “that people really care about the show if they’re feeling those emotions”, especially since it’s a “science fiction cartoon that has these crazy settings”.

Another reoccurring theme throughout Futurama is the show’s frequent cancellation and revival, which is referenced numerous times throughout the series, including in a season 12 opening gag that simply reads, “Who keeps cancelling us?” Although they joke about it, Cohen admits the first couple of times the show was cancelled “it was very emotional”.

“A lot of ‘goodbye forever’ hugging writers and actors and everyone behind the scenes,” he shares. “And then you’re back and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is a one-off chance. This doesn’t happen in television. We’re back.’ And then it ends and you’re like, ‘Goodbye forever again.’ But by the third and fourth time, you have to have a sense of humor about it and just go like, ‘You know what? I’ll see you in eight years, or whatever it is.’

“The first couple of times we were cancelled, I thought, ‘We have a lot more to say and we’re just getting really good at this.’ And now I feel like if the show ended at any time now, I would feel like that’s a complete life’s work and I feel proud of it. Each time we get canceled now I don’t have that fear that it’s an incomplete project. I feel like it will stand on its own now.”

‘Meanwhile’, Season 10

This season, we’ll see the consequences of the previous series finale, season 10’s Meanwhile, start to surface in Otherwise, which was intended as the new series finale, before the show was picked up for seasons 13 and 14. For many, Meanwhile was the perfect ending for the show, and given Cohen has written numerous endings at this point, it seems natural that he’d already be thinking about how he’d like Futurama to end when the time eventually does come.

“We are discussing that on and off now, and we don’t have it quite yet,” he says. “But that’s another thing where… we’ve written now five episodes, which at the time we wrote them we thought was a good chance it would be the last episode ever. And the fifth of those is going to be the last one this summer, Otherwise, that’s kind of a bookend with the episode Meanwhile for longtime fans.

“As far as the future last episode ever… do we want to break everybody’s heart for the sixth time? Do we want it to be a regular episode that has more of the feel of ‘we know we’ll be back’? So, it’s a hard decision to make, but the one thing I’ll say that is consistent is that we want it to be like, ‘Okay, it left us with a good taste in our mouth.’ Like when you eat the last bite of your nice dinner. Whatever the last thing is, we want you to feel like you could live with that.

“So, we think about it a lot, but I think there’s a few ways to get there. But it is not going to be the goofiest, craziest episode ever, probably. It’s probably going to have a little more of a thoughtful tone to it.

“And then, as far as the end of this season, so that was written as a last episode ever, but it’s a little different from the others in the sense that it’s tied very much to the previous last episode ever. And part of that is that, when we came back last year, we were all very satisfied with how the show had ended. I think the fans generally were, with Fry and Leela living their lives together. And we didn’t want to tell people, ‘That never happened. We’re going back in time. Forget about that.’ Because that just diminishes the importance of it. So, we wanted to say that really happened.

“This last episode this year, which is a nice, sweet and emotional one, I think, explores a little bit more about the scattered memories of this other timeline and how they play into Fry and Leela in our new world that we’re in now. So, it’s a little bit far out, but I think it will please our longtime viewers, hopefully without confusing our newer viewers.”

‘Futurama’ season 12 premieres exclusively on Disney+, with new episodes weekly starting tonight!