While working on our resent New Media project comparing the services Netflix and Amazon, I did uncover a phenomenon that appears with one company more than the other. That would be Netflix acquiring or remaking old broadcast network television shows. Thus far, the other service providers, be they Amazon, Hulu or You Tube Red, have avoided America’s pop culture nostalgia love for and the attempt to make all thing old new again.
Netfilx has had much success with it’s “reboot”, as they are now called instead of remake or sequel, of the hit 1990s ABC-TV sitcom “Full House”. Titled “Fuller House” the sitcom reunites most of the cast of the original series and has been talked about quite a bit by many of my friends and aquaintances, most whom know the show better from ABC Family and Nick at Nite reruns than having experienced the show from it’s original 1987 through 1995 network run.
Netflix will also be remaking the 1960s science fiction television favorite “Lost in Space”. This one is loved by several generations and though myself and many of my friends and acquaintances love or loath it, I also know that many of them have never even heard of it. Despite being shows in reruns almost nonstop since it’s 1968 cancellation, many people I know seem to have missed it’s being repeated on USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel or it’s current home on diginet Me-TV. With this one can ask if this remake is a sing that Netflix is not just obsessed with people born somewhere between the Mid 1970s and late 1990s but also seeks to reach out to an older audience who still watches Broadcast and Cable television the majority of the time.
After initially announcing that he was going to remake his popular and influential 1970s television series “All in the Family” with a Latino cast, producer Norman Lear has instead announced he will be rebooting his 1975 through 1984 sitcom “One Day at a Time” with a Cuban-American cast for Netflix. The show, like the original that inspired it, is about a middle-aged women restarting life with her teenaged children after getting a divorce after many years of marriage. Though single families, especially single divorced mothers, raising kids alone was a new and edgy topic in the middle 1970s when the original premiered, it will be interesting to see what this show does to update a premise that has been pretty much everyday for millions of families in the past 40 years.
The previous two shows seem to be an option for Netflix to not only get new material, but to get new material that is not so new and will be familiar to viewers of a certain age to expand their subscriber base and widen it’s demographic age wise Remakes are not always a hit however, as in trying to get people who fondly remember the 1950s and 1960s in the the 1980s, broadcast stations failed with many reboots during the Reagan era with such misses as “The Munster’s Today” and “The New Monkees”.
One remake that looks to take nostalgia lovers beyond the 1990s is Netflix’s revival of the 2000s drama “Gilmore Girls”. Like “Fuller House” this series will come back with most of it’s original stars and show the audience where the characters are in the 2010s and allow fans to catch up with old favorites. As nostalgia tends to run in twenty year cycles, is the “Gilmore Girls” a glimpse of the way many of Netflix new series will look in the year 2024? Will we see reboots of “Two and a Half Men” and “House” by that time? It’s possible as Netflix has discovered that our culture loves its video past.