Futurama's Zapp Gets Canceled Episode Sparked A Long, Nerdy Debate Between Writers
The eighth episode of the latest season of "Futurama" was called "Zapp Gets Canceled," and it finally put the show's most horrendous, inappropriate, and lascivious character, Zapp Brannigan (Billy West), on trial for his life of horrible behavior. He is emblazoned with a bright red "C" (for "canceled") and forced to attend a sensitivity training workshop. Zapp, as thick as two planks, doesn't quite absorb the training, feeling that his arrogant, crass, offensive, racist, misogynistic behavior is perfectly acceptable. Because "Futurama" is a pretty cynical show, Zapp is ultimately proven right. His brashness eventually proves to be useful in a crisis situation, and he is reinstated, un-canceled after all. I suppose the un-canceling of Zapp Brannigan is appropriate, coming from a show that, itself, has been un-canceled several times over.
The writers of "Futurama" are smart cookies, and series co-creator David X. Cohen has bragged in the past that his writers' room contains a collective 50 years of Harvard experience. Even when they're writing cynical stories and crass jokes, they have a keen eye turned to the small details. Notably, for "Zapp Gets Canceled," there was a brief pause in the writing process to ensure one particular detail was 100% correct: The writers couldn't proceed until they figured out whether the word "canceled" had one L or two.
At the 2022 Los Angeles Comic Con, the "Futurama" crew gathered to discuss the new episodes of the show. Co-executive producer Patric Verrone and script-and-continuity department worker Jeanette Lim talked about how vitally important it was to spell the word "canceled" instead of "cancelled."
Canceled vs. cancelled
To settle any internal debates right away, both "canceled" and "cancelled" are typically accepted spellings of the past participle of "cancel," and your English teachers will likely leave their red pen holstered for either. But, according to the Merriam-Webster website, the one-L version is the American spelling, while the two-L version is the more common British version. The same can be said of traveled/travelled, marveled/marvelled, fueled/fuelled, etc. (Fun linguistic quirk: Americans use double-Ls for the words "fulfill" and "enroll," while Brits use only one.)
At the L.A. Comic Con, Patric Verrone revealed that the episode titles for the current season of "Futurama" were leaked and posted on IMDb without the oversight of anyone from "Futurama," nor from anyone at Hulu. Whoever posted the episode titles got some of them slightly wrong, and Verrone wanted to point out the mistakes, while also giving credit to Ken Keeler, a longtime "Futurama" writer, for insisting the staff knew which version of "canceled" to use. He said:
"I mean, again, there's a story there that's worth telling, which is that one of the writers, Ken Keeler, who is responsible for making our scripts as short as they are and keeping within the page count — in a process known as Keelerization — was quite adamant that the word 'canceled' has only one L, because it's shorter that way. And yet, along comes IMDb or whoever released these with two L's."
Lim immediately jested that "there's an irony of not knowing how to spell this after being canceled so many times."
Evidently, a whole day of writing was lost debating the number of L's. Perhaps they could have just said that "canceled" only had one L, as the rest had been hoarded by the evil, sentient cloud (and massive Trekkie) Melllvar.