Nostalgia for older TV shows seems to be at an all-time high right now, and there are two ways production companies can capitalize on it—reboots or revivals.
In a reboot, you take a fresh crack at a show and often it works out amazingly well. Just take the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which is leagues better than the original property. The alternative is to do a revival, where you simply pick up a show where it left off, even if it’s been decades since the last season. While both approaches have their merits, I’m coming around to revivals more than reboots, and I’ll tell you why.
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We Get to See What Happened After a Series Ended
Maybe it’s the fanboy in me, but I often simply want to return to the world of a show once it’s done. Even when there was a fairly good ending, I can’t help but wonder what happened to those characters. Did they have more adventures? Did they live happily ever after? This is probably the sort of curiosity that you end up regretting as a revival ruins your hopes for a show, but I can’t help but get excited to check in on characters I had a soft spot for in the past.
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There’s Usually No Reason to Recast
Depending on how long it’s been since the last season of a show, there’s often no reason to recast characters unless the actors can no longer act or have sadly passed away in the meantime. In a reboot, everyone gets recast, and it can be fun to see new takes on old characters, but I also love seeing actors come back to reprise their old roles.
It doesn’t matter whether the performer in question has aged, since that can simply be written in to the story naturally. While revivals often need recasting for legitimate reasons, usually if the actors are still available, we get to see the same performers pick up the ball and run one more time, and that’s awesome.
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It Gives People a Reason to Go Back and Watch the Original
When you reboot a show, there’s very little reason for most viewers to go back and watch the original series. This is a double-edged sword in my opinion. It could be good for audiences who now don’t have to engage with the original property and can just watch the new show as a brand-new thing. However, I like the idea of modern audiences going back and watching the previous seasons of an old show in anticipation of a revival.
There are lots of people who never saw the 90s X-Men animated show, and with its revival it became necessary viewing. These viewers pick up on the hype fans of the old show have, and if they know about the revival in advance, it means they’re more likely to watch the original show. Assuming the original show is great (why else revive it?) you’re getting new fans for an established program.
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We Don’t Have to Retread Old Ground
While it can be nice for newcomers to simply watch a reboot and need no previous viewing of the original show to enjoy it, there’s another side to reboots for fans of the original property. Assuming that the basic overall plot is still the same in the reboot, it means going over the same old ground again if you know the source material.
With a revival, people who watched the original simply get completely new content, not recycled and rewarmed story beats. They story progresses further instead of being rehashed, and that’s something I personally prefer.
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It Means Getting a Proper Goodbye
The world of TV shows is fickle, and studio executives can decide to cancel a program suddenly without warning. Sometimes this forces the writers to rush some sort of conclusion at the end of the last season, and sometimes it means there is no conclusion at all, because the cancellation happened after the last episode of the last season was already made.
Even when some shows do end gracefully, there are things left unresolved at the end, and fans are happy about it. This is where revivals really shine, because it gives us a chance at a satisfying ending. That happened when Farscape got a miniseries to tie up loose ends following the cancellation of the show, and it’s happening with shows like King of the Hill and X-Men ’97.
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While there’s definitely a place for both revivals and reboots, given the choice, I’m almost always going to hope for a revival. Well, actually there might be a personal rule of thumb here. If a show was bad, but had an interesting premise, let’s reboot it, but if a show was good, why not bring it back to life instead?