When you look at the new fall schedule, it feels a little bit like looking at a dog-eared TV Guide from decades ago. Starting on Tuesday night, The Muppets are back on primetime on ABC and Heroes: Reborn rejoins NBC on Thursday, just five years after it was cancelled. The X-Files’s return to Fox is right around the corner this winter and Netflix is getting ready to premiere Fuller House in 2016. With all of this happening, at least we can thank everything that is holy that NBC cancelled their planned revival of mediocre 90s sitcom Coach.
And it’s not just shows that are returning for another go around, it’s old movies too: 2002 hit Minority Report premiered on Fox on Monday and Limitless, the 2011 also-ran, is getting a new life on CBS on Tuesday, because it was willed into existence by the power of executive producer Bradley Cooper’s dimples alone. Providing the perfect storm, beloved John Candy movie Uncle Buck is returning to TV for the second time (yeah, CBS tried to make it a show in 1990 too) this winter on ABC. What the heck is going on with all this?
Obviously there are a few reasons why retooling old ideas is all the rage. The first is that the networks already own the intellectual property so a content-creation juggernaut like Disney (which owns both ABC and the Muppets themselves) is just capitalising on their assets. Why keep all those anthropomorphic felt animals in storage when they can be out there on screen earning money and creating more opportunities for stuffed animals, pyjama sets and theme park rides?
Another big consideration is that there are more channels, more ways to watch television, and more original shows than ever – more than 325 scripted TV shows last year alone, by one count. With so much noise in the marketplace there has to be something networks can do to get their projects a little bit more attention or to make them stand out from the crowd. Why create a brand-new futuristic cop drama like Almost Human when Fox can just dust off Minority Report, which is a similar idea but with a whole lot more name recognition (or maybe, in this case, precognition)?
That leads us to promotion. The internet is the biggest buzz-generator of the moment, where tweets about a show can get it renewed and a fan petition can keep a beloved programme on the air for another season – or at least a few more episodes. And if there’s one emotion the internet loves, it’s nostalgia – so just suggesting that one of these old properties might be coming back is catnip for the BuzzFeed crowd. How do you think Fuller House came to be? It was probably a suggestion on one of those 50 Things Every 90s Kid Wants to See Happen listicles, and it gave some executives at Netflix a pretty swell idea.
But there is also something changing in the creative DNA of these shows. Reboots themselves are not new: and for every 90210 (the Beverly Hills 90210 reboot which ran on the CW from 2008 to 2013) there was a new Charlie’s Angels, which in 2011 was cancelled after a grand total of four episodes. Today’s reboots are not new iterations of old formats but rather continuations of the original shows. That is true for The X-Files, Heroes: Reborn and Fuller House – as well as the upcoming Twin Peaks project at Showtime, which will pick up the action 25 years on.
In these shows, the original cast and crew comes back to revisit the initial stories from the first time around with new characters. This approach was pioneered a few years ago with TNT’s Dallas (RIP) and proved to be moderately successful, as did Fox’s return to 24 last season.
This is now the MO of so many reboots. But there is something else at play that speaks to the vast amount of quality television around right now. Many of these returning shows – The X-Files, Heroes and Twin Peaks – are getting a second chance. They were hits that seemed to stray creatively after fantastic beginnings and were then cancelled before many fans had had enough of them.
Such shows existed in a much more competitive time. Now, however, a show like The Mindy Project can get canned on Fox and picked up by Hulu the next day. Thanks to streaming services, there is room in the television landscape for shows that have small but rabid fanbases. Whether this is a trend that will pay off has yet to be seen, but early indications are positive.
The same can’t be said for movies that have been turned into TV shows, especially ones as long gone from the multiplexes as Limitless, Minority Report, Uncle Buck and Rush Hour, which is coming to CBS this spring. Few if any film reboots have been huge ratings successes, and those that enjoyed some longevity or had critical acclaim – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Parenthood, Hannibal, Teen Wolf – have done so by being as unlike their source material as they could (well, except for Fargo, which just made a great movie better).
I wish I could advise Hollywood to stop recycling, but that’s like asking a junkie not to score. As long as there are old hits that can be wrung for a little bit more cash, we’ll see the same shows returning like Groundhog Day. Speaking of which, for God’s sake, please don’t turn Groundhog’s Day into a series.
