As series developer, head writer, and executive producer, Cohen has shepherded Futurama through its many ups and downs since 1999. In advance of the series' seventh-season premiere, Cohen explains the complex, collaborative creative process that goes into creating each new episode of Futurama, and shares storyboards from tonight's first episode, "The Bots and the Bees."

It's usually somewhere in the vicinity of a year from the beginning of a Futurama episode to the day when you can see it on TV. With "The Bots and The Bees," we actually started working last March. It's a very long haul, and most of it is taken up by the animation. It all starts with a general discussion—"What are some stories we haven't done before?"—which is becoming tricky, now that we're up to almost 140 episodes.

Once we have an idea, one of the writers gets assigned to go write an outline, which I usually work on with them. We go back and forth, and the writer eventually writes a script based on that. Then the real work begins. All the writing staff sits around a table, and we grind through the first draft on a word-by-word, scene-by-scene basis: make it shorter, and funnier, and more dramatic, and make more sense out of it. Everything is on the table, but if we decide at that point to throw out a whole storyline, it's a lot of work. The more we can nail things down at the outline stage, the better off we are. You don't want to pitch a hundred jokes on a part of the story you're going to cut. Next, the actors come in to do a table read. We hear what it sounds like, make some changes, and record it like a radio show. We hand that off to the animators, and then it's their problem. [laughs]

The animators usually have a script for about six months. They get a month or two in the U.S. working on the storyboards [...] which become an "animatic" halfway along the way. It's sort of a pencil version of the show. Maybe one drawing per second—much jerkier than the normal animation you'd see—but it gives us a general sense of how they're planning to stage everything.

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We give feedback to the animators about how we think the jokes are playing, and do a little bit of a rewrite there. The same thing happens again when the color animation comes back from South Korea, where they do the coloring and the in-between frames. We can do a little bit of punch-up there. Any big changes we make have to be done fairly quickly, and it's fairly expensive at that point. But thanks to the miracle of modern digital editing, we can change lines, by cutting out the character's mouth and reordering the mouth position.

It's such a long feedback loop. We write something, and we don't know what the fans are going to think—or even what we're going to think, when our minds are clear of it and we watch it a year later. You write an episode, you watch it a year later and decide, "Oh, I like that, I'm going to keep going in that direction" and write another episode—that's not on for another year. So it's really a two-year feedback loop, at minimum.