creator Matt Groening has insisted he believes the upcoming final episode of the animation won’t be the last, given the amount of times the show has come back from the dead.
The sci-fi comedy, Groening’s first big project after creating , ran from 1999 to 2003 on the Fox network in the US. It was then revived by Comedy Central, where new episodes aired from 2008 to 2013. Streaming service Hulu then brought the show back in 2023.
The final episode of the current run has the tongue-in-cheek title Final Ending: The Last Conclusion, a reference to previous finales that were meant to be the season’s conclusion. Following the episode’s airing last night (September 28), Groening has declared that he believes this won’t be the end of the show. “They can put us in a coffin. They can nail the lid shut, but they can’t bury us. We will rise again,” he told . “I guess I’m not too worried.”
“The thing about ‘Is coming to an end?’ Well, we’ve come to an end many times before,” he continued. “We make a joke about it with the season finale. It’s redundantly, fatalistically titled. I think we have a whistling-past-the-graveyard attitude these days because we’ve been in this situation many times before. We have lots more stories to tell. The animators and the actors and the writers all would love to do more stories and we’ll see. You never know.”
There is always the possibility that this could be the end, and Groening said there are plans for that as well. “If it doesn’t happen, we’ll do something else,” he confirmed. “I love the group of people that work on this. It’s just a blast to work together. In fact, the cast of and the animation studio and many of the writers also worked on , which I did with Netflix for five seasons.”