Oh be still, my nerdling heart. Nothing is certain, but with the return of Family Guy and the success of DVD sales, Futurama could indeed find its way back to your TV screen, at least via your DVD player. Whether it will return as a direct-to-DVD feature or as a full-fledged TV series is unclear, though I would definitely enjoy the latter. I have all the DVDs, and would gladly buy more.

For those of you who don’t know about Futurama (HEATHENS!), it’s an animated series made by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. It’s about Philip J. Fry, a delivery boy who, at the turn of the (current) millennium, is depressed by his fate to be a delivery boy. By chance (or maybe not), he is cryogenically frozen and awakes in the year 3000, deliriously happy to become… a delivery boy! But in the future! He immediately befriends an alcohol-fueled robot named “Bender” whose fate is to bend things, and a one-eyed alien (or maybe not) space-captain babe named Leela. He finds his great-to-the-umpteenth-time nephew, a decrepit old Professor Farnsworth, and through him the crustacean (and yet somehow Jewish) Dr. Zoidberg, the professional-limbo-dancing Rastafarian accountant Hermes, and Amy, a clutzy rich-brat exchange student from Mars. The show is just as rich with cultural gags as its cousin The Simpsons, except that all the famous people from the 20th century are now heads in jars. The series included guest voices Dick Clark, Pamela Anderson, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking, Lucy Liu, Sigourney Weaver, John Goodman, Hank Aaron, and almost the entire cast from the original Star Trek (some of them making more than one appearance).

The show was consistently funny, and remains at the top of my own list of Shows That Should Be Brought Back. And believe it or not, Starsky & Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard, nor Miami Vice are not on that list.