30 years after the characters who would become The Simpsons first premiered on television (as part of The Tracey Ullman Show), Netflix has decided that maybe this Matt Groening guy has some potential, after all. The streaming service announced today that it signed a deal with the Simpsons and Futurama creator to make a new “adult animated comedy fantasy series” called Disenchantment, and has already ordered 20 episodes of the series.
Despite bearing a title that sounds more like the daily process all of us go through upon waking and realizing that it wasn’t a nightmare, we really do live in this world now, the show takes places in a faraway land. Viewers will journey to the “crumbling medieval kingdom of Dreamland, where they will follow the misadventures of hard-drinking young princess Bean, her feisty elf companion Elfo, and her personal demon Luci. Along the way, the oddball trio will encounter ogres, sprites, harpies, imps, trolls, walruses, and lots of human fools.” Okay, so maybe it’s a little like this world.
The show will star Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson as the princess, Nat Faxon as Elfo, and Eric Andre as Luci. Groening has also recruited a bunch of voice actor heavy hitters, including John DiMaggio, Billy West, Maurice LaMarche, Tress MacNeille, David Herman, Matt Berry, Jeny Batten, Rich Fulcher, Noel Fielding, and Lucy Montgomery. “Disenchantment will be about life and death, love and sex, and how to keep laughing in a world full of suffering and idiots, despite what the elders and wizards and other jerks tell you,” Groening says. Indeed, who among us hasn’t had some elder wizard try to boss them around? Disenchantment will premiere ten episodes at a time, starting in 2018.