It is a bit of a time warp while watching television these days.
What’s that old saying? “There’s nothing new under the sun” and apparently nothing new in TV land either.
Depending on your view or perhaps your attachment to the shows themselves there is a reboot-a-palooza going on.
Everything old is new again.
Among of the old shows back or on the way back: Rosanne, Murphy Brown, Dawson’s Creek , Will and Grace, Full(er) House and The X Files.
There are a couple of ways to look at that trend.
Either Hollywood writers are tapped out of original ideas or there is a real thirst for nostalgia.
I have always believed that every single comedy just took a page from I Love Lucy. Lucy, Ricky, Ethel and Fred really set the bar unbelievable high. If you watch closely, every antic they did FIRST has been re-done in some version on other shows ever since.
If you going to do a reboot I suppose the way Rosanne did it by bringing back the entire original cast is the best. It seems to have worked with 22 million people watching the first episode. It will also work in this current Trumpian culture with Roseanne as a Trump supporter taking on other family members who are not. I suspect there is a lot of family discord around the dinner table over politics.
Others remind us of a simpler time when we were all young and bright eyed. It is fun to see how the Tanner kids have grown up in Fuller House. It doesn’t hurt that Uncle Jesse (John Stamos) is still drop dead gorgeous. Have mercy!
Some are just never going to work. They attempted to do a new 24 last year and it was a dismal failure. Sometimes it’s the star who makes the show. Kiefer Sutherland was 24 and without him it doesn’t matter who steps in it will not fly. You cannot replace him. With that real time format he was Jack and always will be, dammit!!! Got to move on, tick-tick-tick.
My jury is still out on how I feel about the reboots.
I guess I just prefer the originals.
This nostalgia trend is not going anywhere fast—get ready for these series to be revisited this year: Magnum P.I. (without Tom Sellick), Cagney and Lacy, Tabatha the Teenage Witch and Charmed.
This is going to force me back into my parachute pants and shoulder pads and the huge earrings (who am I kidding those never went away!)
May all your memories be fond ones!
