NEED TO KNOW
Bob’s Burgers is focused on the present.
Creator Loren Bouchard revealed at the show’s panel at New York Comic Con that he has no plans to ever explore the future of the beloved characters for one specific reason.
When asked if the series will ever flash forward, he said, “We try not to have it be objective reality, like the show knows and here’s the facts. That, I think, would not be fair.”
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“The show doesn’t know. We can’t know. We’re treating them like real characters, so none of us know. But we can imagine. The characters can imagine,” Bouchard added.
The animated comedy follows the Belcher family — married couple Bob and Linda and their three kids, Tina, Gene and Louise — as they run their hamburger restaurant.
Also present at the panel were voice actors H. Jon Benjamin, John Roberts, Kirsten Schaal, Eugene Mirman, Dan Mintz and Larry Murphy.
The other panelists took a moment to share what they imagine their characters will get up to in the future, with Mirman saying he sees Gene being a “restaurateur and in a band,” and Schaal adding that Louise would be “inventing some kind of new weapon.”
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Bob’s Burgers has aired for 16 seasons and a movie since premiering on Fox in 2011. The network announced in April that the show was renewed for four more seasons, carrying it through its 19th season.
Episodes of the show have followed the characters theorizing about their futures, such as the season 13 episode “What About Job?” in which a school assignment causes Louise to imagine her future career options.
Bouchard opened up to Variety in September about the show’s success amid its 300th episode milestone.
“It’s a hopeful show about a working-class family with this irrational, creative, barely profitable dream at the heart of it — the restaurant. And because they never age, we’ll never know if they’ll succeed or they’ll fail, but we feel their drive and their fundamental optimism, and that’s probably valuable to some folks,” he said.
“Optimism is an underrated and complicated thing. Cynics can dismiss it, but that’s because when it’s done poorly in entertainment, it plays like schmaltz. Bob’s is about a grittier, deeper hope and how it works for you even in hard times,” Bouchard continued.
