Just look at the reaction of the fans (some positive, many not) to last week’s news from a Sex and the City sequence of the series to know that bringing back an old TV property is dangerous territory. But when it works – either as a continuation of the original series or as a new version of a familiar title – it can be exciting. Here are 10 of our favorites: five revivals with some or all of the original actors and five reboots that started from scratch.
10 Duck Tales (2017-2021, Disney XD / Disney)
The original ’80s series – about the adventures of Scrooge McDuck and his great-nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie – is loved by Generation X and the Millennium generation who watched it on weekdays after school. But the new version – starring David Tennant as Scrooge, Danny Pudi as Huey, Ben Schwartz as Dewey and Bobby Moynihan as Louie – looks like an even better mix of comedy and adventure, and benefits enormously from the expanded presence of the boy friend Webby ( Kate Micucci).
9 The Conners (2018-present, ABC)
Good TV is usually the product of a specific moment in the lives of the characters on the shows and the people who make them. Most revivals cannot cope with the change in context – Rory Gilmore’s behavior as a 32-year-old is much less charming than when she was acting in exactly the same way as a teenager – but The Conners (and the only season relived from Roseanne, done before his star was fired for racist tweets) turns the new context in his favor. The America where Dan, Darlene, Becky and the rest of the family now find themselves is a much more difficult and expensive place to live than during the original season of Roseanne, and the comedy feels palpable right now, while remaining true to the spirit of the nineties episodes.
8 Babysitting Club (Until 2020, Netflix)
A laggard on the trend and one of the few things on television to feel good about in 2020, this new version of Ann M. Martin’s long series of children’s novels (first adapted for TV in 1990) brought her high school heroines into a more modern world. At the same time, it seemed like a throwback to simpler times and softer storytelling values. A huge charming.
7 The x file (2016, Fox)
This certainly needs a huge asterisk, because we are only counting the episodes not written and directed by Chris Carter, who created the original ’90s science fiction feel about two FBI agents trying to prove, or unmask, seemingly supernatural mysteries. Carter’s attempts to invent a new history of government conspiracy were disastrous on almost every level, with dialogues so bad that they created the illusion that stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were bad actors. But other Monster of the Week standalone episodes X Files the vets were quite strong, and some of them (notably the satire written by Darin Morgan “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat”) would fit very well into the classic race of the program under the Clinton administration.
6 Roots (2016, History)
The original 1976 miniseries – adapting Alex Haley’s bestseller on the history of his family’s slavery in America – was not just one of the most watched programs in television history, but one of the most important, setting an impossibly high standard for any attempt to revisit the material. But the 2016 version of History was flawlessly launched (including Malachi Kirby as Haley’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte, and the future Bridgerton star Regé-Jean Page as Kunta’s grandson, Chicken George), and found ways to modernize the narrative without losing the essence of what made the book and the original TV so powerful.
5 Columbus (1989-2003, ABC)
Peter Falk is one of those actors who looked like he was born old. So when ABC brought him back after a decade-long hiatus from his iconic role on NBC as the seemingly bumbling, but secretly brilliant homicide cop Lieutenant Columbo, it didn’t matter that he was already in his sixties – nor that he would continue playing the role, intermittently, until his seventies. All the good lieutenant needed was his deceptively sharp intelligence. Just one more thing…
4 – Doctor who (Current 2005, Sci-Fi / BBC)
The science fiction series about an immortal traveler through time and space has been a British TV institution for decades, constantly playing the lead role as the Doctor died and “regenerated” with a new face and personality. But the BBC canceled the original version in 1989 and it took the Doctor 16 years to return properly – played in this modern and intelligent incarnation by Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi and now Jodie Whittaker – with enough of a budget increase so that the episodes no longer seem to be filming in someone’s basement.
3 – One day at a time (2017-2020, Netflix / Pop TV)
Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcom about a single mother raising two teenagers has returned as the even more up-to-date story of a Cuban-American veterinarian (Justina Machado) with two children, a theatrical mother (Rita Moreno) and a tendency to get carried away . in every urgent issue of the moment. A wonderful and warm mix of the old and the new, it became the rare show to survive Netflix’s cancellation, only to end a second time when its new Pop TV came out of the scripted television business.
two Twin Peaks: the return (2017, Showtime)
Twenty-five years later, David Lynch and Mark Frost revisited their classic 90s mystery drama of cult, about strange actions in a Pacific Northwest city – and did it in a Lynchian way that was just as disconcerting (Kyle MacLachlan basically played his original character, the upbeat FBI Agent Dale Cooper, for about five minutes) and emotional (a largely black-and-white episode about the birth of evil), and often both at the same time.
1 Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009, Sci-Fi)
The gold standard for reboots, and that should be a practical lesson for anyone who wants to dust off some useful IP. The trick is not to redo a beloved classic, because there is little advantage in that, but to find a project with a great idea and poor execution. So extravagant Star Wars the cheating on a fleet of starships in search of a new home planet has been reinvented as a fascinating allegory of 9/11 in space.