How far can TV take its ’90s revival?
Era lands in a sweet spot of nostalgia — a mineable commodity for executives
LOS ANGELES — Roseanne Conner’s return to her famed couch may be giving agita to antiTrump activists and bringing discomfort to some ABC employees.
But it’s heartening to another group: the many television insiders with 1990s revivals in the pipeline.
For the past year or so, television has been engaged in a quiet bid to resurrect the decade of flannel, as executives address ratings woes by packaging Clinton-era characters for nostalgia-thirsty audiences.
Murphy Brown and her “FYI” team will be prepping new investigative stories for CBS this fall. “Will & Grace,” who began hearting and hugging in September, will continue doing so on NBC not only for a second but a third season. Netflix is currently shooting a new “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” which, unlike the revivals (same tone and cast), will be a reboot (different tone and cast).
Yet while many see salvation in the ’90s revival craze, others question whether the early success of “Roseanne” can be replicated and how much the business would benefit even if it could. “I think any time you get those kinds of numbers, it’s good for those shows but also good for television as a whole because it means people are watching,” said Greg Berlanti, film director and TV producer, articulating the pro-revival camp’s position. Berlanti (“Love, Simon”) is behind the new “Sabrina,” a more darkly inflected Netflix series titled “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.”
But others wonder about both the trend’s appeal and long-term health.
“I understand that networks want brands to hold onto,” said Jane Rosenthal, the longtime producing collaborator of Robert De Niro and co-founder of the
Tribeca Film Festival, which later this month will première a “Karate Kid” TV revival titled “Cobra Kai.” “But does it make for something original?”
The popularity of “Roseanne” has been hard to deny. The first two episodes in the revived ABC series garnered a whopping 18.2 million viewers. That’s more than any other show drew in the entirety of 2017, save one. The followup episodes notched solid totals of 15.2 million and 13.5 million viewers, respectively, though whether nostalgia or politics has fuelled the series’ success remains up for debate.
This after a revived “Will & Grace” debuted to more than 10 million viewers on NBC last fall.
“There’s a comfort food (appeal) from a simpler time, like why people still eat Lucky Charms or Honeycomb,” said Snoop Dogg, taking a break on a recent afternoon from taping “The Joker’s Wild” reboot on a Sony sound stage. “And people need comfort food right now.”
This television mac and cheese couldn’t come along at a better time for Hollywood. It has been a rough era for the major broadcast networks, which rely on ratings to sell ads and ads to pay the bills. Last year, every network suffered declines in the key 18 to 49 demographic. NBC did the best, and even it dropped eight per cent from the prior year. Fox performed worst, down 17 per cent.
A well-calibrated revival might change that. “Roseanne’s” debut reignited interest not just in the series but the very concept of big “overnight” ratings — the idea, thought obsolete with the advent of streaming and DVRs, that the right scripted programming can draw a large audience to simultaneously watch a show the first time it airs.
Hoping to drum up similar mojo, the WB has ordered a pilot for a “Charmed” reboot, recasting the witchy sisters who first took to the airwaves in the late 1990s and making them 2018ready. Danny Jacobson and Paul Reiser, who created NBC’s 1990s marital staple “Mad About You,” have been in talks with studio Sony to revive the show.
The barrage of throwbacks can partly be chalked up to demographics,
creators say. The ’90s land in that sweet spot of appealing both to adults who spent their formative years watching these shows, and their children who are now old enough to enjoy them, a kind of millennial reproductive effect.
The love for the era was recently evident with a glossy magazine reunion of “Dawson’s Creek,” which nearly melted the internet without so much as a frame of new footage.
“I don’t think networks want to be seen as looking backward,” said Bruce Helford, an executive producer on “Roseanne” who also worked on the original series. “But I think with the timing of a show like ours, you can get a lot of people who liked the first go-round at the same time as you get a lot of young people to discover