Many of us haven’t thought of Uncle Buck, John Candy’s haphazard caretaker who flipped giant pancakes with a shovel and told the school principal to have a rat gnaw the mole off her face, since that movie was at the multiplex in 1989. However, on Tuesday the same character returns to television 27 years later in the sitcom Uncle Buck. It’s as if the Terminator’s 1984 catchphrase “I’ll be back,” applies to all sorts of movie properties right now, with a whole batch of them making their way to television. Why the heck are 80s movie properties like totally awesome right now?
It’s not just Uncle Buck that we’re going to have to contend with on the dial. Adventures in Babysitting, released in 1987, is getting a TV adaptation this summer. Lethal Weapon, which came out the same year (man, ’87 was a good year for movies), is going to be on television this fall. This is just the tail end of the trend of older movies finally coming to the small screen. Last year 1981’s The Evil Dead returned from the grave as Ash vs Evil Dead and 1976’s The Omen became Damien. Fargo, Minority Report and Rush Hour were all turned into series more than a decade after their film premieres.
It’s not like movies being turned into TV shows is anything new, but let’s look at Uncle Buck again for second. This isn’t even the first time the movie was turned into a TV show. You may not remember, but there was a 1990 version starring Kevin Meaney as Buck in a much more conventional adaptation – in other words, just a year after the movie had been a huge hit. This used to happen all the time, until producers twigged that viewers weren’t interested. Working Girl came to television and tried to make Sandra Bullock a star two years after it did the same for Melanie Griffith. (It failed.) Clueless recast the role of Cher and showed up on the tube a year after it had been a hit in cinemas. Even Baby Boom went to series a year after Diane Keaton played the world’s first organic applesauce entrepreneur.
The reason we’re seeing such a lag time now has more to do with television than it does with our movies. In the age of “peak TV” there are multiple new scripted shows every week. Last year saw more than 400 new shows, by one count. It’s almost impossible to get a new property to stand out. What’s one easy way to get some easy attention? Revive a beloved piece of 80s pop culture, of course! Fans, at least those old enough to remember watching 80s movies on VHS, will immediately know what these shows are all about and, hopefully, pick up the remote to relive their glory days.
This phenomenon also has something to do with the intersection of nostalgia and having all of these old movies available to us to watch again and again. When Baby Boom was being made into a TV show, it was a lot harder to get access to the movie than it is now. In the late 80s it entailed getting in the car and driving down to the video store to rent it for a few days. It was a lot easier to relive the movie by turning on the TV once a week than doing all that. Now, of course, Baby Boom is just a few clicks away any time you might want to see it. Movies aren’t “dead” in the same way that they used to be. (Also, it’s hard to make TV shows out of movies when Hollywood only churns out sequels, reboots, revivals, and, yes, remakes of old TV shows.)
Also, easy access to old movies and TV shows can create new generations of fans, as we’re seeing now with teens who are obsessed with the show Friends. I don’t think that our young people are sitting around watching Uncle Buck all the time, but that is the reasonable justification that networks suits make for glutting up their rosters with things from the cold war.
But Uncle Buck didn’t even really need to be Uncle Buck. This reboot has some key differences from the original movie. First of all the family is African American, but that isn’t really a key difference, just the most obvious one. The biggest difference is that Buck moves in with his brother and sister-in-law and is helping take care of the kids while they’re around. In the first iteration of the TV show the parents are totally absent, which was keeping more in the spirit of the movie. The comedy of Uncle Buck was putting someone in charge that needs supervision himself. Minus that supervision, anything could happen. Now that Buck has two reasonable adults around him at all times, how bad could things get?
Uncle Buck seems more like a reboot of Mr Belvedere except instead of a haughty British butler to help raise the family, they got an irresponsible manchild. (Maybe call it Mr Belvedere but he’s named after the vodka?) All that Uncle Buck has going for it is that name recognition of the original property. It’s the same with Lethal Weapon. Though the pilot hews closer to its source material, buddy cop shows have been a TV fixture for decades. Creating another one should come easy, but what would make it stand out from all the other cop shows? How about giving it the imprint of a successful movie franchise?
Right now broadcasters are trying anything they can think of to get a leg up on the competition because it’s fiercer than ever. So far the reception to Uncle Buck has been so bad that many are calling for an end to remakes altogether. That’s not going to happen any time in the near future. Oh, speaking of future, do you think Ryan Murphy is interested in a Back to the Future anthology series?
