REVIVALS JUST AREN’T THE SHOWS THEY USED TO BE AS FASHIONABLE AS TELEVISION REVIVALS HAVE BECOME – GILMORE GIRLS, WILL & GRACE AND ROSEANNE – THE PHENOMENON HAS NEVER LIVED UP TO THE MATERIAL IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE RESTORING. WHILE THE RETURN OF A BELOVED T
WHY REVIVAL TELEVISION NEVER LIVES UP TO THE MATERIAL IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE REVIVING SADAF AHSAN
o the chorus of a live studio audience, the door swings open. There stands a woman in a t-shirt that declares “Nasty Woman.” Arms outstretched and standing firm, she narrows her eyes and asks her sister, standing frozen in front of her, “What’s up, deplorable?” The audience reaches hysterical levels of laughter. After a familiar, twangy musical cue and commercials play, she continues, “Knee still giving you trouble? Why don’t you get that fixed with the new health care you all got promised?” Her sister, with a smirk, simply responds, “It works good enough to kick your ass, snowflake!”
It’s a pivotal scene in the first episode of the newly revived season of Roseanne, in which politics weigh heavy but Donald Trump’s name is never mentioned. Once close-knit sisters Roseanne and Jackie haven’t been on good terms for the last year, because while Roseanne has abandoned the left for the right with little explanation, Jackie has remained a bleeding heart liberal. The remainder of the episode crams in enough hot topics to make the ladies of The View proud: race, sexuality, single parenting, the military and surrogacy all receive attention.
In the sitcom’s original run, from 1988 to 1997, it, too, tackled social issues from the perspective of the Midwest, working-class American family at its core. However, it seemed to come about its subject matter organically. Audiences grew with the show over its nine-season run so that the voice that Roseanne established felt authentic. Fast-forward to 2018, and the show’s return often feels like a cable news rundown segment, only without the chyron graphics. Despite an astounding amount of critical attention focused on it – thoughtful essays in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Guardian among many others – the Roseanne revival’s first five episodes don’t come close to matching the original. And it’s not alone in garnering this type of disappointment.
As fashionable as television revivals have become, the phenomenon has never lived up to the material it is supposed to be restoring. While the return of a beloved series is meant to satisfy our appetite for nostalgia – that all-too human tendency to gather comfort from the familiar – revivals are often more about sizzle than substance, emphasizing buzz before brilliance. In fact, the recent spate of rekindled series have been more likely to leave feelings of unease among viewers, a repulsion similar to the one we feel when we’re confronted with a human-like android; something recognizable, but slightly off. In this sense, revivals have become the menacing replicants of television.
The concept was first attempted with The New Leave It To Beaver (1983-1987), a sitcom sequel to Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963). The relative success of the show proved to be an outlier, however. Networks tried the formula again and again in the early ‘90s. The Brady Bunch, Get Smart and WKRP in Cincinnati were a few of the first to make comebacks. All three featured the majority of their original casts, but wrapped up after only a handful of episodes due to abysmal ratings. It wasn’t until two decades later, when primetime teen soap network CW rebooted Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place, that new life was breathed into the format. Both series followed the children of original characters, with many of the cast from the first series reprising their characters for guest spots or supporting roles.
However, the tide didn’t truly turn until Netflix flexed its development muscles. In 2012, the streaming service announced that it would be resuscitating cult classic Arrested Development, originally a Fox property, for an additional season. The show premiered in 2013, and was renewed for another season earlier this year. In its wake, Netflix has gone on to bring back Gilmore Girls, Fuller House and Wet Hot American Summer all to massive hype. The buzz around the Netflix revivals triggered a flurry of renewals, including Prison Break, Will & Grace and Twin Peaks, with The Office and The West Wing reportedly in talks to return.
Networks seem desperate to cash in on our collective thirst for nostalgia. And it makes sense that we’d look to something familiar given our turbulent political times. “The attraction toward nostalgia can be triggered when there are conditions of substantial change or uncertainty,” says Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Syracuse’s Le Moyne College and the creator of the Nostalgia Inventory Test. “During times of transition or when stability is threatened, nostalgia provides a psychological anchor to keep us grounded in who we know and who we believe we are.”
Watching Rory Gilmore on the hunt for a job in her 30s after seeing her study endlessly in her teens, or reflecting on Darlene Connor parenting her own rebellious children connects us to “a sense of identity across time.” Television is particularly powerful in this regard. The medium’s visual stimuli combines with musical cues and opening themes to prompt us to make highly emotional, subconscious investments in characters. As a result, we end up building vicarious relationships with the characters we see on screen. Think of the fans who lived through Rory’s love triangle on Gilmore Girls, declaring themselves #TeamJess or #TeamLogan.
While returning to that relationship is appealing to us, it also presents a risk. Inevitably, things change in the interim between the conclusion of a series and its revival. And that passage of time can create space for discomfort. Having skipped such a large swath of time – in Roseanne’s case, two decades – a cast can appear much older. A suddenly aged Lorelai Gilmore still debating whether a life with Luke Danes is worth it tends not to be as entertaining as it was a decade earlier. Instead, it reminds us of our own age, our own choices, our own mortality.
Batcho describes the moment before this type of unease settles as “a mental visit to a former time” or, more simply, “a walk down memory lane.” But every vacation, even mental, is temporary. “If we stay too long in the past, we become uncomfortable, knowing that we, like our lives, have moved on,” Batcho says. “Although it can be enjoyable and even helpful to visit the past, it can no longer serve the emotional and psychological concerns we have now.”
This was of little worry to the record-breaking 18.2 million viewers who tuned into Roseanne’s March premiere. And while the series has levelled off to averaging a mere 13.5 million viewers a week – a typical decline for any television series after its premiere – other revivals have not fared so well. The American Idol reboot, this year’s X-Files and Will & Grace all suffered massive dips in ratings after their premiere. In fact, NBC’s Will & Grace might be the most blatant example of this trend, pulling 15.8 million viewers for its premiere, but falling all the way down to 6.4 million viewers for its finale.
“We often idealize the past and remember things to be better than they actually were,” says Andrew A. Abeyta, a psychology professor at Rutgers University. “But once the euphoria of nostalgia wears off, people find themselves confronted with reality.” That reality can often point to the inevitably weaker points of a revival.
Stories are weighted with heavier expectations that come from years spent offscreen: Did Character A and Character B end up together? Did they have a child? There is also pressure for a series to comment on the now and establish itself as relevant. For Roseanne and Will & Grace, that meant heavy-handed debates about Clinton and Trump. The unsightly result is as awkward as a dad trying to use teenage slang to communicate with his child and their friends. Perhaps the only worse tendency of television revivals is the habit of employing narrative gymnastics to explain former cast members not signing on for new episodes. For Will & Grace, that meant everything the original finale told us – that the iconic pair had stopped speaking to each other for several decades and each had children who would eventually grow up to marry – had never happened. Now, the two leads are living together, never having married or had children, while their original significant others, played by Bobby Cannavale and Harry Connick, Jr., are nowhere to be seen. And each of these twists were revealed using the laziest trope: “I had the craziest dream.”
When not slipping into an ugly form of self-parody, the latest batch of revivals have verged too far into the arena of fan service. Each joke is played with a knowing wink, with countless callbacks to episodes of yore. It’s reminiscent of breaking the fourth wall, but done in a fashion so garish it becomes a spectacle. It also reminds viewers of the more cynical purpose behind the series returning to television: not because there’s more story to be told, but because there’s more money to be made by manipulating our desire to derive comfort from the familiar.
That isn’t to say a visit to the past is an inherently poor choice. There are ways of doing it justice. Take, for example, Netflix’s Stranger Things. Set in 1980s Middle America, it’s a clear riff on the pop culture of the era. In interviews, creators Ross and Matt Duffer have admitted paying homage to the work of Stephen King, and adding notes of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to their series. Other original sitcoms like Fresh Off the Boat and The Goldbergs, or dramas like This Is Us and Glow, have used a similar blueprint to make use of nostalgia without a looming best-before date, proving it is possible to repackage the past, without reliving it.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how great the cast or staff of writers, how popular or how topical, revivals rarely manage to skate by on more than fairweather nostalgia. Wrung dry of story, the magic is lost, beloved characters appear more like caricatured clones inside someone else’s clothes. It’s a discomforting experience for good reason: losing a character we’ve grown up with is like “losing a part of the self,” says Abeyta.
In the organically wistful Mad Men, Don Draper once described nostalgia as “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” He described that place as a home “where we know we are loved.” As we pine for a respite from everyday anxieties, the call of revival television is like an invitation, not to our own childhood homes, but to those of the beloved characters we were raised alongside.
For nearly a decade, however, television has been moving us there backwards, trying to make a broken formula work. While there is a comfort in what we know, perhaps it’s time we finally moved forward and turned on something new.