Yes, Netflix’s cool sci-fi anthology cartoon Love, Death & Robots is still going, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was over. A fourth season was announced, but that announcement came back in 2022, and in the downtime its creators started up a different anthology for Amazon Prime, Secret Level (a second season of that show is in development now). Nope, Love, Death & Robots is still alive, and here’s the proof.
The delay is even more weird when you consider how quickly Seasons 1, 2 and 3 were released. The time span between some of those seasons was less than a year. No explanation has been given for the hiatus between Seasons 3 and 4. The show has won 13 Emmys so far. You’d think the drive for a 14th statuette would have pushed them to hurry.
The same people who were in charge of the previous three volumes will be in charge of this one: Tim Miller, David Fincher, Jennifer Miller, and Joshua Donen as executive producers and Jennifer Yuh Nelson as supervising director. Writers and directors will vary depending on the short. They manage to land some impressive names for some of these (David Fincher directed an episode from Season 3).
As for what this season’s stories will be about, Netflix won’t really say, beyond the hint of “Dinosaur gladiators, messianic cats, string-puppet rock stars, it can only be Love, Death + Robots.” The trailer doesn’t reveal much either, offering a whirlwind of unrelated and unexplained clips in a variety of animation styles. It’s possible we may get a more substantial trailer closer to the release date that reveals a a bit more.
Back when Season 3 was released, Miller revealed there are actually way more shorts that get pitched than make it into the final product. “It’s not because it’s hard to find good ones, but because there’s so many good ones. It’s really hard to choose which ones are actually gonna go in the show,” he said. “You have amazing directors in studio and there just aren’t enough stories or slots for everybody,” adds Nelson. “That’s the hard part because you just want everybody to be able to do something.”
Love, Death & Robots returns with ten new episodes May 15.
