Your Favourite TV Show Might Get A New Cast!
Over the past decade, Hollywood has become enamoured with reboots and revivals.
The trend has spread from film 🎥, where franchises like Charlie’s Angels and Star Wars have been given new life in recent years, to TV 📺, where successful projects have included Will & Grace and Roseanne (which morphed into The Conners after Roseanne Barr was fired).
Why do the networks continue to greenlight these projects? New versions of everything from Party of Five to Mr. Mom are being developed for 2019. Here are 3 key 🔑 reasons you can expect to see more of this trend in the future:
1️⃣ Reboots draw attention 👀
The cast of Will & Grace appeared on magazine covers, were interviewed on news magazines, talked to radio 📻 programs, and more. Most other new sitcoms came and went without getting one of those things, much less all of them. Also, people already know the characters and conceit of the show with a revival. This frees up the network’s marketing team to be more creative in its advertising, which can also be more effective ✅. It is less exposition they have to fit into a commercial.
2️⃣ Reboots have a large potential audience
Murphy Brown ranked among broadcast’s top 10 shows at its peak. It is not hard to imagine that a good portion of those viewers would want to see how the character is faring today. Executives figure they were so popular 🌟 once, so why not try again? Yes, that can lead to high initial tune-ins for a premiere and then substantial decreases in coming weeks.
This has been seen with Brown, Roseanne, Grace, and an abundance of other shows, going back to the late 2000s revivals of V, Bionic Woman, and Knight Rider. Still, a big initial tune-in may be worth banking 🏦 on in a network environment where more than half of new shows do not return.
3️⃣ Reboots with a twist are easy sells to executives
Familiarity breeds content in Hollywood 🤩, where ideas get recycled ♻️ over and over because they are safe. It makes for less of a gamble to revive it than to come up with a totally new concept if you know something already succeeded at a different point in time. All it takes to make the pitch successful is a slight twist 🌪 on the original concept.
For instance, the new Charmed features a more diverse cast than the first one, including a lesbian witch, and has a distinctly feminist point of view. When a meeting begins with “picture so-and-so beloved character, with this unexpected twist”, the network knows the backstory and the history of the show, and that makes it easier to sell.
Do you prefer the originals or the reboots? Let us know in the comments below 👇👇👇😎.
Reference:
Fitzgerald, T. 2018, October 30. Reboots And Revivals: Three Reasons Networks Dig Up Old TV Shows And Movies. Forbes.
