10 Best Futurama Episodes, Ranked

With Season 14 now streaming on Hulu, and the announcement that three super-sized special episodes will come to the streamer in the near future, "Futurama" is the show that refuses to die — and we wouldn't have it any other way. But what are the best episodes of all time? That's where TVLine comes in.

There's truly no other sitcom like "Futurama" out there. It has a classic fish-out-of-water premise with Fry (Billy West) being frozen for 1,000 years and waking up in the year 3000 where he becomes an interstellar delivery boy and befriends cyclops mutant Leela (Katey Sagal) and robot felon Bender (John DiMaggio).

But "Futurama" is so much more than a sci-fi-infused comedy. It's a beautiful merging of classic sitcom set-ups, brilliant mathematical jokes, ruminations on the nature of the universe, and some of the downright saddest moments in TV history. "Futurama" can do all this within a span of 22 minutes, which is why it's one of the best animated sitcoms ever made. 

The best "Futurama" episodes ever find a way to masterfully merge the hilarious with the saccharine. They fully utilize the show's sci-fi leanings in an accessible manner so that you never feel like the series is trying to pull one over on you. Much like Fry himself, "Futurama" perpetually feels like a show out of time, like you're watching something that astronauts should be watching in the far off future. Maybe that's why it keeps getting cancelled...

Read on for a ranking of the 10 best "Futurama" episodes of all time.

Like most sitcoms, "Futurama" doesn't rely heavily on continuity or lore dumps. Each episode introduces a new mission or alien race for the Planet Express crew to contend with, and after three acts, the status quo is resolved. But the universe of "Futurama" got a little bigger with "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" that plays with our knowledge of what this show can be.

Leela discovers that her dumb, beloved pet Nibbler (Frank Welker) is actually part of a hyper-intelligent species known as Nibblonians, who wage war against the evil Brain spawn. They travel planet-to-planet making everyone dumb before destroying everything, and now, they have their sights set on Earth. And the only person who can stop them is Fry, who's immune to the Brains' dumbing powers due to him lacking the delta brain wave. It's a level of hard sci-fi that's allowed "Futurama" to define the genre on the small screen. 

"The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" is a wonderful melding of low-brow and high-brow humor. You have people shouting the dumbest things imaginable, like "Let's buy internet stock," combined with a climax that sees Fry and the Big Brain duke it out in classic novels like "Pride and Prejudice." The episode proves how sitcoms don't have to be fully dumb or smart; they can have their cake and, uh, do something else with it, too.

Sometimes you don't need a new planet or weird scientific concept to make a great episode of "Futurama." You just need to give all the characters $300 and watch them go wild.

That's the premise of "Three Hundred Big Boys," and the results are superb. Fry buys 100 cups of coffee. Professor Farnsworth (Billy West) uses stem cells to make himself look younger, and Kif (Maurice LaMarche) buys a watch for Amy (Lauren Tom) that gets swallowed by a whale. Whereas many episodes will have a traditional A plot/B plot structure, "Three Hundred Big Boys" plays it loose. It's a wacky set of events where everything manages to converge flawlessly in the climax.

"Three Hundred Big Boys" doesn't have a flashy set-up. It's all about characters, as we learn a little something about all of them based on what they spend their $300 on. Easily, the sweetest storyline belongs to Zoidberg (also West), who wants to live up like a king on $300, but upon realizing that kind of money's nothing in the grand scheme of things, decides to host a hot dog banquet for his friends. It's masterful writing that makes you laugh and deepens the characters.

There have been many great TV shows about time travel. It's one of the most fun sci-fi plot devices to play around with, but few series have ever matched the level of satire "Futurama" achieved with "Roswell That Ends Well."

The Planet Express crew accidentally travels back in time to Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, making their ship the alien structure found in the desert all those years ago. The episode brilliantly plays around with conspiracies, especially with the revelation that Zoidberg is the alien the U.S. government acquired. 

But the episode also has fun with time travel tropes, most notably the whole "Changing anything in the past will affect the future" guideline. This culminates in Fry killing his grandfather while inadvertently sleeping with his grandmother, making him his own grandpa. While definitely gross, it closes any and all paradoxes nicely. And it shows how "Futurama" doesn't just bring up sci-fi concepts for a quick gag; it actively deconstructs them at every turn. 

The multiverse is everywhere now. Heck, it's even a plot device in a "Big Bang Theory" spin-off, "Stuart Fails to Save the Universe." But before multiverse stories were winning Oscars, it was a driving force in the excellent "Futurama" episode, "The Farnsworth Parabox."

Professor Farnsworth creates a new universe inside a box where the only difference to the regular universe is the outcome of coin flips. On the one hand, it's a lot of fun to see slightly different versions of our cast, like a Bender who's solid gold. But the episode does an exceptional job exploring something central to multiverse stories — What would happen if your life turned out somewhat differently?

In the alternate reality, Fry and Leela are dating, which causes a ton of distress for Fry Prime. It shows how close Fry got to getting the one thing he's always wanted and just barely missed it. But this deep, philosophical question gets punctuated by a mad-dash through various other universes that allow for quick gags, like one where the crew's all bobble-heads or are missing eyes. Again, it's that mixture of a high-concept premise meeting really stupid bits, and it's glorious. 

The golden era of "Futurama" was easily when it was airing on Fox before its untimely cancellation. But when it returned on Comedy Central, there were still a few gems, particularly "The Late Philip J. Fry."

Fry's budding relationship with Leela gets strained due to him always being late. But he winds up a man out of time (again) when he test-drives Professor Farnsworth's new time machine with Bender, which only has the power to go forward in time. They accidentally go too far, sending the trio on an odyssey to go forward enough in civilization to where they can find a backwards-moving time machine.

After watching "Roswell That Ends Well," you might think "Futurama" has said all it needs to say about time travel. But the idea of a forward-only time machine is a brilliant concept that shows the lengths Fry will go to in order to be reunited with Leela. Honestly, going through time and seeing civilizations rise and fall is beautiful. Like other great "Futurama" episodes, "The Late Philip J. Fry" uses a classic sci-fi premise for non-stop gags while having a strong emotional core. 

It's odd that "Futurama" probably has several of the greatest TV finales of all time, but it hasn't technically ended just yet. It's the show that refuses to die, but if we had to pick a place where "Futurama" could've called it a day, it's "Meanwhile."

Fry jumps off a building after believing Leela refused his date invitation where he was planning on proposing to her, only to discover he got the time wrong. Unfortunately, he's now stuck in a never-ending fall due to one of the Professor's inventions creating a time loop. Eventually, time as a whole gets stuck outside of Fry and Leela, so they grow old together until Farnsworth comes back to rescue them. 

It's a beautiful conclusion to Fry and Leela's arc. We don't see them get married in a traditional sense, as would be the case on any other sitcom. But "Futurama" has never been like other sitcoms. When Farnsworth finds them and offers to reset the timeline to make them young again, Fry asks Leela, "Want to go around again?" It's a heart-wrenching conclusion, almost as though Fry is asking the audience to stick with "Futurama" and rewatch the show from the beginning so that "Futurama" always stays in our lives.

We're now at the part of the list where we talk about "Futurama" episodes that are emotionally devastating. "The Luck of the Fryrish" involves a bitter Fry believing his older brother Yancy (Tom Kenny) stole his name, dreams, and lucky seven-leaf clover following his disappearance. Fry plans on stealing back the clover, only to discover that Yancy actually name his son after Philip to carry on his memory. 

It's outstanding writing all the way through. The episode sets it up so that you're ready to hate Yancy no matter what, only to show him as a kind-hearted brother. And what adds an extra layer of grief is that there's no emotional reconciliation for Fry. He can't make amends with his brother or get to know his nephew because he's too far ahead in time. 

Making Fry a man out of time on "Futurama" offers a lot of comedy. But there's an underlying tragedy to his existence, too. His family may have been dysfunctional, but he went missing before he could really get to know any of them. If that's all too heavy for you, just know that Bender has some pretty good grave-robbing jokes in here in liven things up. 

The first "Futurama" series finale comes in the form of "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings." There are no epic battles or a big wedding between Fry and Leela. Yet, it feels like it could've been the perfect place to leave things had the show never returned.

Fry makes a deal with the Robot Devil (Dan Castellaneta) to become a great holophonor and inadvertently winds up with the devil's hands. He creates an opera based on Leela's life to finally win her affection, but the Robot Devil has other plans. Instead of focusing on science fiction conceits, things play a bit more fantastically here. Fry makes a classic Faustian bargain, with the focus consistently being on his relationship with Leela.

The Robot Devil getting a spotlight is fantastic. He has a ton of great lines, like critiquing Fry's opera: "You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!" And it all ends on a wonderfully poignant note with Fry losing the Robot Devil's hands, but Leela asks for him to finish the opera anyway. It's a moment of recognition where they don't officially get together, but you feel as though Leela has finally accepted Fry for who he is, flaws and all.

You knew this one was coming. "Jurassic Bark" is one of the few cartoon episodes guaranteed to make you cry. Even knowing how it all ends and watching it numerous times doesn't dampen the impact. 

Fry discovers the fossilized remnant of his old dog, Seymour, and Professor Farnsworth offers a plan to bring the pooch back to life. This upsets Bender, who doesn't want Fry to have another best friend, but he comes around by the end. It's Fry that stops the procedure, as he realizes Seymour was 15 when he died, meaning he lived a full life without Fry. That's when we get perhaps the most heartbreaking montage in television history, as we see how Seymour spent years waiting outside the pizza place for Fry to return. 

Much attention gets paid to the final scene, which is definitely heartbreaking. Everything else that precedes it is typical "Futurama" lunacy. It's fun seeing Bender try to win over Fry's attention, and the flashback sequences of Fry hanging out with Seymour are delightful. It makes the finale hit so much harder because it comes so much out of left field. Other online outlets place "Jurassic Bark" at the top of their "Best Futurama Episodes" lists, but for us, there's one episode that encapsulates everything great about "Futurama" just a little bit better. 

If you had to show someone an episode of "Futurama" who had never seen it before to convince them to watch the whole series, you probably wouldn't want to go with "Jurassic Bark." It's just too sad, in a way that isn't typical of most of the show. Instead, the episode that has the best writing, excellent jokes, and a profound philosophical depth that utilizes science-fiction tropes is hands-down "Godfellas."

Bender becomes lost in space and becomes the god of a civilization that forms on his chest. But that society blows itself up, sending Bender into an existential crisis when he meets an entity that may or may not be the actual God. It's a great subversion to see Bender legitimately trying his best to do what's right by his people and then talk with maybe-God about what it means to do right in the universe. 

"Godfellas" perhaps has the most profound line in all of animation: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." Even for unreligious types, it's a captivating idea that we're less likely to search for answers when everything is going right, but that doesn't mean there's not some profound creator out there in the cosmos. "Futurama" brings science, religion, and comedy together in a way no other show has been able to. That's the beauty of "Futurama" and why it remains an all-time sci-fi classic.