This week, Sarah Michelle Gellar, star of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, announced that a planned Hulu reboot was not going ahead because of a Buffyphobic television executive. This is weird, because the original show was among the most groundbreaking on television and everything gets a reboot these days. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, itself, a reboot of Joss Whedon’s less-successful movie of the same name.)
At this stage of human history we are in a self-eroding loop with the past. The algorithms that run culture – some looking human and wearing suits – are obsessed with the glories of yore. So they prefer a tried-and-tested story to new ideas. Indeed, the Marvel, DC and Star Wars cinematic universes are essentially designed to be self-rebooting, IP delivery systems spurting out new iterations of old characters with minimal human intervention. There have probably been two or three new Spider-Men (Spiders-Men? How do you pluralise it?) since I started writing this article.
This is not always a bad thing.
Let’s start with …
Some good rebootsBattlestar Galactica
Ronald D Moore’s 2000s remake of the 1970s Star Wars-inspired series by Glen A Larson took Larson’s slightly hokey religious allegory about the human race being pursued across the galaxy by killer robots and turned it into an epic exploration of contemporary politics, spirituality and moral philosophy.
This is fascinating in retrospect, because this was a remarkably apolitical era in loads of ways. Perhaps by hiding his story’s complex ethical questions about political violence, governmental repression and moral injury in sci-fi, Moore was tricking his audience into political engagement. Or, more likely, people ended up thinking, “Now, if the president was doing this in space maybe I’d do something about it, much like these space people. However, I am on Earth, so meh.”
The Den
Feelgood anarchy: The Den returns. Photograph: RTÉ
The return of Ray D’Arcy and Zig and Zag to RTÉ television in a short-lived reboot of the chaotic children’s show The Den, at the height of Covid, was perhaps less politically charged than Battlestar Galactica (though Zig and Zag, puppeteered by forces outside their control, clearly represent the lot of the worker under capitalism), but it certainly helped me regress to childhood at a moment of national difficulty. I said at the time that they should have put this on instead of the news. I stand by this.
The Muppet Show 
Sabrina Carpenter with the Muppets. Photograph: Mitch Haaseth/Disney
It’s easier to reboot shows like The Den and The Muppets because, to be blunt about it, Muppets can’t die. That should be the terrifying slogan for any Muppets-related spin-off. Because while Seth Rogen can pull Fozzie and Gonzo and company out of a crate and stick them on the stage once more, you can’t do the same with human vaudevillians. Take the Three Stooges out of their boxes for a Weekend at Bernie’s-style romp and you’d certainly be arrested.
Endeavour
A preboot, really, in which John Thaw’s Inspector Morse is reimagined by Shaun Evans as a melancholy, investigative dreamboat who must solve the many murders of 1960s Oxford. There aren’t half as many murders in today’s university environment thanks to helicopter parenting and woke.
Fargo
Fargo: Jessie Buckley in season four
One of my least favourite Coen brothers films became one of my favourite TV programmes after it was remixed by Noah Hawley into five strange, gripping, stylish crime series with an array of excellent actors and a plethora of Coen brothers tropes. Irish national treasure and Oscar winner Jessie Buckley stars in series four, which means we can probably get away with using a picture of her for this article.
Gladiators
Big men and big women in skin-tight Lycra knock members of the public from high platforms using padded sticks while children bay for blood. I think this is part of the criminal justice system now. It’s strangely cathartic in both its 1990s and its contemporary iterations. The new version is overseen by Bradley Walsh and his son, Barney, who slaves down the television mines like his father and grandfather before him. (He secretly dreams of being an accountant.)
Some less successful rebootsMagnum PI
Look, no shorts: Jay Hernandez in the reboot of Magnum PI. Photograph: Karen Neal/CBS
No moustache. No short shorts. No little man in a safari suit. (They made Magnum’s sidekick Higgins a woman for the reboot.) Do not speak to me of the False Magnum. Indeed, do not talk to me of the False MacGyver or the False Matlock or, indeed, the False A-Team. Do not let these servants of evil deceive you.
House of Cards
Kevin Spcecy and Robin Wright in House of Cards
There’s a whole subcategory of reboots that remake UK classics. Sometimes this works out well (The Office) and sometimes it means disgraced human ham Kevin Spacey doing a honking Foghorn Leghorn impersonation. The House of Cards shtick also doesn’t work so well in the context of contemporary American politicians who confess their crimes directly down the camera lens instead of soliloquising nefariously but quaintly into the fourth wall.
Gossip Girl/90210/Saved by the Bell
When the algorithmic executive class reboot teen dramas they tend to take a “next generation” approach, with a whole new cast of teenagers. It’d be better to just put the original actors back in a high-school setting. I don’t think anyone really thinks of television “teenagers” as young adults in a real sense. Television teenagers are mythical creatures, like ewoks or smurfs or hobbits or Galwegians. Just reverse-Bugsy Malone it, that’s what I say. Think Brendan Grace as Bottler. That’s how we should do teen dramas from now on.
Some reboots apparently on the wayMalcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair
The original cast of this very funny show about a boy genius and his blue-collar family are returning to our screens in April. The reboot even includes Bryan Cranston, who subsequently went on to star as a teacher turned crystal-meth dealer in Breaking Bad, wherein life was very unfair.
The Secret Life of Us
Australians are basically Irish people who’ve seen a bit more sunlight. I’m no scientist, but this seems to have enabled them to grow cheekbones. (Traditionally, Irish faces have no bones.) I really liked the Secret Life of Us, a show from the early 2000s about cheekbone-gifted twentysomethings (including subsequent Hollywood escapee Joel Edgerton) living chaotically in a block of flats in Melbourne. There are rumours it may return.
Baywatch
Baywatch, a show about swimsuit-clad lifeguards running in slow motion, once served a very specific purpose. We all have the internet now, even your weird uncle who loved Baywatch “for the plot”, so the new iteration will serve a new purpose. It will probably be a gritty and thoughtful analysis of decaying American infrastructure, the erosion of the social contract and the rise of fascism in the United States. “Aw,” says your weird uncle. Look, it will surely still include slow-motion swimsuit-running. “Yay,” says your weird uncle.
A show they should rebootThreads
Written by veteran scriptwriter Barry Hines, the terrifyingly realistic 1984 docudrama about a nuclear strike on Sheffield terrified my generation. Given that that nuclear conflagration was triggered by a conflict in Iran, Threads is already being rebooted in the context of “the news”. That’ll probably do the trick, to be honest, for whatever time we have left.