Just Crush Me With Reboots, Already

This TV season gave us more Will & Grace and another Star Trek. Netflix just rebooted Queer Eye and gave us another batch of One Day at a Time episodes. The X-Files came back from the great beyond, and we’re getting more Roseanne and Murphy Brown. And then there’s Fuller House, the king of all relaunches that keeps coming, year after year. And I haven’t even mentioned CBS’ procedural reboots of MacGyver and Hawaii Five-0. Big chunks of the TV landscape look about like they did 20 years ago, so much so that it’s enough to give any proponent of the Peak TV era pause.

Not me. I’m done trying to fight it. Networks, hear me: just crush me with reboots, already. Pile them on. I want to be pinned on the couch by the overwhelming weight of nostalgia.

If this sounds like the cry of a person that’s been beat down by life, then welcome to Being A Person In 2018, the year that followed 2017 and 2016. Every day brings a dozen new horrors, horrors that I won’t even bother linking to because they will be outdated whenever you’re reading this. If 2018 is a wasteland, then I want to escape to a ’90s fantasyland. I’m the engineer of this train of thought because I’ve come to realize three things, and may these arguments help those out there that feel bad about how good they feel watching these all-new repeats.

First of all, reboots aren’t new. Relaunches aren’t new. I know there’s a whole “Ugh, Hollywood today is all out of ideas, why can’t it be like the good old days?” hot take lighting up every hater’s brain right now, but it’s malarky. TV was “out of ideas” from the get go! The original big two sitcoms, I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, were themselves continuations of older stuff. Lucy started out as the radio show My Favorite Husband and The Honeymooners was originally a sketch on the variety show Cavalcade of Stars. And it didn’t stop there! Both Mama’s Family and Charles in Charge were resurrected in syndication after being canceled by networks, and WKRP In Cincinnati and What’s Happening!! got sequel series years after they ended. After lasting two seasons in the ’60s, The Addams Family and The Munsters were resurrected decades later for new shows that outlasted the originals. And nothing could keep The Brady Bunch off of television! They came back first as a variety show, then a TV movie, then a sequel series, then another TV movie, followed by another sequel series (that one an hourlong drama!). This is a part of pop culture! The good ol’ days when relaunches didn’t exist doesn’t exist.

Second, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this so let me shout it from the top of my entertainment center: most of these reboots have been really good. Netflix relaunched and rebooted One Day at a Time and Queer Eye for the current TV landscape to heartwarming results. Both offer always-needed representation, with One Day at a Time tackling everything from depression to gender nonconformity to immigration issues with equal smarts and heart. Will & Grace makes me think that the instant a sitcom gets stale, it should take 11 years off and come back stockpiled with ideas and pent up energy. It’s that good. I’ll give you that The X-Files has been more hit or miss, but when it hits? It hits as hard as the original series (thank you, Darin Morgan). Fuller House has been the poster child of this trend, a sitcom scapegoat unfairly maligned as if the new show is somehow worse than the schmaltzy ’90s romp it’s continuing. Here’s the thing: if sequel series weren’t in vogue, I would never have seen DJ wrestle a celebrity koi fish or compare foot sizes with Lonzo Ball.

 

Third, and this is the major point, there is no shortage of new content. Like, seriously, there are, at any given time, at least 450 scripted series in some stage of production. The arrival of streaming services ranging like Netflix and Hulu, not to mention the pivot that a lot of previously reality-focused cable channels have made towards scripted content (like Bravo and the relaunched Paramount Network), has ensured we are all overwhelmed with options at all times. Netflix released 18 seasons of TV in January alone! I’d wager that the number of nostalgia shows has just grown proportionally with the rest of scripted TV, which continues to grow like a… fast-growing Chia Pet? Listen, I don’t know, all this talk of old shows has my brain stuck in yesteryear.

But that’s the point.

TV is magical. It can be informative, it can be revelatory, it can be cathartic, but it can also be an escape. Just because it’s one doesn’t mean it’s not the others, and it can be all of that all at once (see: One Day at a Time). It is vital that we all stay aware of our surroundings, for sure, but these extreme times call for a similarly extreme escape. So if ABC eventually decides to reboot the entire TGIF universe with sequels for Family Matters and Step By Step, I say bring it on. Pull me to the past, because I know the headlines are going to drag me back to the present no matter what I watch.

Where to stream Will & Grace

Where to stream One Day at a Time

Where to stream Queer Eye

Where to stream Fuller House