Once upon a time, there was an animated television series about a hapless pizza delivery guy who got kicked a thousand years into the future… and despite two cancellations and living on several television networks, Futurama is still alive after almost a quarter of a century. While its bigger sister series The Simpsons has become old, tired and predictable, Futurama is still coming up with fresh ideas and the first new episode after a ten year hiatus that just came out on Hulu in the USA and Disney+ in Europe does not disappoint.

With only six episodes in the new tenth season of the X-Files, it looked like the small band of writers wanted to include one each of the more common story types of the series. The previos episode made an amusing detour into comedy, but Home Again does a complete 180 degree turn deep into drama mixed with horror – a combination that sometimes worked on previous episodes, but was not so successful this time. The somewhat frustrating second half of the new X-Files series is partly a reason why I’m so hopelessy behind with the reviews and even though all episodes have now aired everywhere, I’m still write about them because my impressions seem to deviate from the overall consensus. Is this the point where the X-Files go off the rails or is it just a one-time blunder? We’ll see…

If there’s one thing that The X-Files is not particularly famous for, it’s humour, since the series tends to keep on the suspenseful, mysterious and dramatic side. So it’s easy to forget that there have been more than a dozen episodes with light-hearted stories that often branched into outright comedy – and with only six episodes in the new mini-series, there was no way that the humouristic angle of the show could be ignored. Luckily, Chris Carter thought so as well and enlisted the help of Darin Morgan, who had written some of the more funnier early episodes of the series and came up with the brilliant Mulder and Scully meet the Were-Monster. Yes, we are behind in Europe – while the final episode has already aired in the US, we are only on the third in England and Germany unless you want to pay for the streaming offers from Amazon or iTunes, which are in sync with the American broadcasts.

It’s good to have them back on the television screens – fourteen years since the last episode aired and almost eight years since their second movie, Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully have returned to open the X-Files once again. For a long time, creator and producer Chris Carter had been looking for a way to continue the series either with a third movie or more episodes – and at the beginning of 2015 a proper compromise was found with a six-episode mini-series, allowing the lead actors the freedom to pursue other projects and the producers to concentrate on quality and not volume. The first episode, which aired in the UK and Germany this Monday, had a lot to promise and mostly delivered the good stuff – it feels like classic X-Files from the early days of the series with all the familiar elements in place.

In What is our Future, the final episode of his new series Human Universe, Brian Cox takes a look both forwards and backwards in time to ask what will become of humanity in the near and distant future. This maybe inevitable question the overall theme leads itself to takes the astrophysicist again literally from apeman to spaceman and beyond, going to amazing places from caves in Spain, one of the most northern places on Earth, an underwater training facility, the remains of the mighty Apollo rockets in Florida and many more. It’s a wonderful conclusion to the whole series with a mostly positive and hopeful message, although Brian Cox does not shy away from delivering some stern warnings.

The penultimate episode of Brian Cox’ new documentary Human Universe was again a return to the old form. Called A Place in Space and Time, this time the astrophysicist takes a look at how humanity found out about its locations in the universe. As usual, this again involves travelling to a lot of exotic locations, but not without very good reasons – this time the journey goes to England, Morocco, Italy, the USA and Poland. It’s one of the most epic, but also most amazing and entertaining episodes of the series so far with many surprises and a wonderful surprise guest.

Are we alone? This is what Brian Cox asks in the third episode of his documentary Human Universe – an uneasy question not only because of its conspirational undertones. But the astrophysicist does not wax lyrical about UFOs or goes alien hunting, but remains with two feet squarely on the ground and answers the question in his usual rational and scientific manner. In contrast to the previous episode, this one is again much more solid and centers around the probability of life other than ours in the universe. There is much traveling to exotic locations and there are even swimming pigs, but this time it is all held together by a strong common theme.

In the second episode of his new series Human Universe, Brian Cox travels to India and Japan to try answering one of the biggest questions of humankind – how we came to be here on this planet. The main themes of this episode are actually random chance paired with the laws of nature and how they are responsible for just the right coincidences to make the evolution of humankind possible. The approach is somewhat less scientific and a bit more philosophical and unfocused than in the first episode, with the many examples and analogies missing a common thread.

Brian Cox had already tackled the Wonders of the Solar System, the Universe and Life in his previous three brilliant BBC documentaries and this year he has been filming his fourth series, focusing on human evolution. Made by the same great team that worked previously with Brian Cox, Human Universe walks firmly in the footsteps of its predecessors and the first episode, broadcast on Tuesday by BBC2, has already been amazing. This will be the first of a series of short reviews of each episode which I hope to continue in the next weeks.

In the last few years, Brian Cox has become somewhat omnipresent on british television. The rockstar-come-physicist-come-television star had first presented six Horizon documentaries between 2005 and 2009 for the BBC with his own two full-length series Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe following in 2010 and 2011. Together with comedian Dara O Briain, he was also the co-host of three Stargazing Live events and gave a televised physics lecture at the end of 2011. David Attenborough has said that if he would need to choose a successor, it would be Brian Cox. But is the popularity of the good-looking scientist just a hype? His new five-part series Wonders of Life shows that this is most definitely not the case. Mixing physics and biology for the first time, Brian Cox once again succeeds brilliantly in bringing a sense of wonder to the television screens.