Cohen Talks New Season of “Futurama”

After one of the longest hiatuses in history, “Futurama” kicks off its new season on Comedy Central tomorrow night.

And while the cable outlet has signed off for 26 episodes of the series, don’t expect to see all of them this year.

Producer David X. Cohen says that cable outlet will air two sets of 12 episodes and two holiday special episodes over the next two years.

“We’re doing 26, but Comedy Central is going to air them as two seasons of 12, plus two specials. At least, that’s the current plan,” said Cohen. “So this summer run will be 12. The first 12 are gonna air straight through every week from June 24th through the first week of September, every Thursday night at 10 p.m. And they’re showing the first two consecutively on the 24th. So 12 will be this mini-season, I guess, at Comedy Central. And then we have a Christmas special, or a holiday special, I should say, in December. And then another season of, we think, 12 in 2011, and another special.”

And what’s in the cards for that holiday special, you ask. Will we get more of Robot Santa? The answer is yes. And we’ll also get guest voice work by Coolio and a fourth-appearance by Al Gore (his daughter Kristen is part of the writing staff, so they kind of have an in….)

But first up, Cohen says that the series will resolve the cliffhanger from the end of the last movie.

“For any fans who were watching the DVDs, they may recall we left our characters in a serious bind at the end of the last DVD movie, where Fry and Leela were kissing goodbye and flying into a wormhole, perhaps never to be seen again. And, of course, that reflected our knowledge about whether the show was coming back or not at that time. We did not know,” said Cohen. “But here we are back, so we do have some continuity, rest assured, in the very first episode where we deal with them getting back to Earth, and also with the very bizarre sci-fi consequences of Fry and Leela’s romance.”

“The first episode is entitled ‘Rebirth,’ which is obviously a metaphorical title about the show, but also the very surprising literal description of what you’re going to see, because our characters endure some severe bodily harm at the beginning of the show, to put it mildly, and the Professor has to rebirth them in his stem-cell-powered birthing machine. You see the futuristic birthing process as the show comes back to life in the first episode. And as I said, we’ll pick up Fry and Leela’s relationship, which will have a heavy-duty sci-fi twist to it. I’m giving away too much.

“And the second episode that night is a Zapp Brannigan episode where Leela and Zapp Brannigan get stranded on a Garden-of-Eden-like planet. And, of course, Zach Brannigan is eager to repopulate the universe there … The benefit of being Comedy Central is we don’t play any battles about the censorship issue. So they have rather small fig leaves on them for the duration of that episode. Yeah, there is a little bit more cartoon nudity. Just a little bit more. We’re not pushing it too far.”

The season premiere of “Futurama” is tomorrow night on Comedy Central. Episodes air Thursdays at 10 p.m. EST. Tomorrow night will feature two new episodes with each week following airing one new episode.