The dangers in bringing back a TV classic
Revisiting a much-loved show like Sex and the City is a risky business. Most remakes fail to recapture the magic of the original, writes
When it was announced this week that Sex and the City was being remade, albeit without key cast member Kim Cattrall, hardcore fans of the series mainly reacted with what can politely be called trepidation. Without Cattrall’s Samantha Jones, it might as well be called ‘Blank and the City’, most reckoned. Others balked at the premise of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) ‘navigating’ love and friendship in their fifties in the upcoming show, titled And Just Like That.
The two big-screen instalments — absolutely soaked with cliches, bad jokes and bewildering caricatures — flogged the original project to a state beyond recognition. Wasn’t that suffering enough, for us and for the show itself?
A more generous critic might say that we could always use a nice, glossy tale of fiftysomething women who, until a few years ago at least, were much under-represented in TV. Others hope against hope that even a glimmer of the series’ original magic, not to mention its ground-breaking power, might show up in SATC’s latest incarnation.
But here’s the thing about reboots and remakes. They can’t ever hope to recreate the magic, the moment in time, or the success created in the original version. Sex and the City left an indelible mark on pop culture when it launched back in 1998, mainly because we had never heard women on TV offer a blow by, eh, blow, post-match analysis of their sexual conquests. The reception, the fandom and the social climate around it really made SATC the behemoth that it is.
Nearly 25 years later, we live in an entirely different cultural landscape. We’ve enjoyed an embarrassment of riches of young single women ‘navigating’ life. Yes, many of them built comfortably on the success of Sex and the City, but they have captured a new moment, and a new mood.
The same thing is happening in cinema. Jumanji, Star Wars, Sonic The Hedgehog, Mulan — there’s an unshakeable sense of déjà vu when it comes to the current and forthcoming crop of cinema giant offerings.
And for every A Star Is Born, there’s a Robin Hood.
A glut of mooted remakes for 2021 hint at a televisual industry that has run out of ideas; or at least, run out of people willing to take risks on new blood. Among the much-loved series that are in the re-works include Noughties poshromp Gossip Girl, Steven Spielberg’s un-finest hour Animaniacs, Disney’s saccharine Lizzie Maguire, 1960s comedy Bewitched, and The Jetsons, which was set in the year 2062 (a year we are closer to now than the year it was first made, 1962).
A mooted remake of Clueless, meanwhile, has been described by Deadline as ‘if Mean Girls meets Riverdale meets a Lizzo music video...’ — which is where you can probably see the problems start to come in.
There’s a very good reason why the film and TV industry is so fond of a rehash. These days, an executive is likely to get entirely canned over a flop. Gone are the days when they were able to move on quietly to the next project and vow to do better.
It’s a cut-throat business. Sticking your neck out rarely works; at least, not like it did during days of yore. And this is why it’s easier to dust off a tried-and-tested entity, take a script that has already gone through the development process, and stick today’s ‘It’ boy or girl in the lead role.
Nostalgia is rarely a bad thing at the box office; commercially, remakes pretty much cut through the clutter. Whatever about today’s fickle audiences, you can at least be guaranteed that the curious and the loyal will schlep down to the cinema and logging into Netflix to at least see what the fuss is about. It stands to reason that nostalgia is doing big business at the moment. We’re naturally keen to hark back to simpler and more pleasant times when we didn’t know what an R-rate was, or when pubs weren’t ‘wet’. And in a world that is becoming more polarising and divisive by the day, of course we want to remember the cultural moments that brought us all together.
But attempting to recreate lightning in a bottle is a fool’s errand for TV executives. Yet if you must dust off old favourites and breathe new life into them, may we suggest a few golden rules, born from the mistakes of others?
First things first, don’t make the idea that we are now very much into the present day into a thing. In its 2018 rehash, Roseanne was far too on the nose about the current political climate, making references to snowflakes and Making America Great Again. Previously, politics were brewing in the background of the Conners’ blue-collar existence, but only tangentially. Which made things all the more authentic.
Secondly, it won’t do to simply rest on old glories. A reboot has to be as zingy, urgent and singular as the original series. The US version of The Office knew this all too well. Tempting though it may have been to rest on its original
joke — the dreariness of the typical office — the American version, starring Steve Carell and John Krasinski, forged ahead with new ideas, jokes and characters.
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s version of The Office is roundly considered a perfect TV series, but the US version divined the balance between respecting the original, and using it as a launchpad to somewhere else.
If you are going to dredge up a stone-cold classic, make sure that you can inject plenty of 21st-century razzle-dazzle into it, too. CGI and special effects are in much greater supply than they were decades ago, so use them to reel in whatever cult following the series amassed first time around.
V was a miniseries that ran in 1983, and was rebooted in 2009. It was cancelled after two series, but received favourable reviews nonetheless. One US critic wrote: “The special effects are feature-film quality; the writing is intelligent and time-relevant; and the acting is first-rate.”
Similarly, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, an adaptation of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, has managed to carve out a singular, modern look and feel of its own. Its star, Kiernan Shipka, is a delight as the half-witch, half-mortal, and a world away from Melissa Joan Hart’s portrayal of the character.
There’s also such a thing as staying too faithful to the original premise. Fuller House, which was a continuation of the 1990s family comedy, relies heavily on its original storylines and ramped up the cheesiness, leaving viewers less than sated.
Another cardinal sin: the Olsen twins, who as toddlers made their names on the series, were nowhere in sight, although the script of the reboot took plenty of potshots at them, explaining Michelle’s absence from the Tanners’ lives. If you weren’t there the first time around, these in-jokes become entirely meaningless.
It also helps to remember the vast chasm between those who loved the original, and a new generation of viewers. Saved By The Bell, the 1990s comedy that was released in the US in November, smartly engages with both. Its makers understand that the things that made the comedy so popular in the 1990s are not likely to translate the same way for Gen Z.
Darren Starr, SJP and co — consider yourselves officially warned.