Is It Time To Give Reboots “The Boot”?
- Emily Bunder
- 55 minutes ago
- 6 min read
A relative of mine recently said to me: “Films aren’t the same anymore, I don’t want to see anything at the cinema nowadays.” She worked in the film industry for 50 years. I had just finished asking her about her career and she reflected fondly, but to see her disappointment at what was once her scene saddened me. I thought back to the last time we had been to the cinema together. We saw The Naked Gun (2025), a legacy sequel to the original franchise from the 1980s and 1990s. I’ve seen this trend much more in TV shows than I have in films, but The Naked Gun (2025) is a sequel done right. It paid homage to the original film, whilst not trying to be a failed carbon copy. It was funny, it was entertaining and it did the job correctly by introducing new viewers to the franchise without losing the appeal of its previous fans. But although I loved this instance, this is certainly not the case for many sequels or reboots.
My favourite TV show of all time is How I Met Your Mother (2004). It’s cleverly written with creative foreshadowing, has numerous running jokes and has some of the best character development and handling of sensitive topics of any show I’ve ever seen. Everyone was absolutely hooked, desperate to find out who the mother was for nine seasons. When I first finished the show, I struggled to find something to fill the void it had left in me. But in 2022, How I Met Your Father was released, and it was…not great. The seasons were shorter and the characters became boring after a while. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who thought this, as it was cancelled before we found out who the father was.
How I Met Your Mother (2004) is of its time. If we tried to replicate the behaviour of some of the characters or some of their jokes on TV today, we’d have numerous complaints to Ofcom about every episode. I wonder what the kind of reception the character of Barney would have gotten, had the show premiered in the 2020s. He was never my favourite; his treatment of women is often subject to criticism from his friends. But for many modern-day fans, he’s the highlight of the show. Sometimes I question this. Are we not supposed to be against this behaviour? This might be controversial, but fictional characters, to most people, are not examples of how we are supposed to act. Every character in the show has their flaws. Robin and Ted both cheat on partners, Lily has moments of selfishness and Marshall, on reflection, is actually quite a good guy. In fact, the lack of a Barney-type is something I think the show’s sequel struggled with, because he was such a quintessential part of the original.
Another show with a character similar to Barney is Gossip Girl (2007). Though I’ve never seen the show in full, the parts that I have seen I’ve enjoyed. It’s got a great feeling of escapism to it, which sometimes people need for comfort. For a brief moment, we can imagine that we’re part of the high life on the Upper East Side and that our mere existance is interesting enough to make the news. The 2021 reboot, not as successful. It had very high viewership, I assume from the huge fanbase of the original show, but many of them seemed to be disappointed, calling it cringy. The series was cancelled after two seasons. The same thing happened with one of my teenage favourites, Pretty Little Liars (2010). Its 2022 spin-off was cancelled in 2024.
Somehow, even the dreaded cliché of childhood nostalgia applies here. The 2007 Nickelodeon show iCarly is a prime example of this. Given its popularity with a generation of tweens, it seemed like the perfect series to reboot for a future audience. Instead, we were given an adult version of the show in 2021, with dirty jokes and racy plots, which, although typical in most shows, no one expects to come out of the mouths of the characters we loved as kids. This does, however, get even creepier when we remember who created the original series, Dan Schneider, a man with numerous sexual misconduct allegations. Schneider may not have been directly involved in the creation of this reboot, but his legacy still remained in the opening credits because he created the original show. Remembering this only makes the whole situation even creepier, the subtleties of sexual innuendo in his show for children now coming out into the open through a more adult script. In seeking a cure for our childhood nostalgia, we ruined our childhood innocence.
I am not nostalgic for exact replicas of shows from the past. To me, the beauty of TV and film is how the ideas just keep coming. I love seeing what people can create. But I do miss a certain element of TV that was made over ten years ago. What do all of the shows that I have mentioned have in common? The seasons were longer, and the airings were spread out. The days of 25 episode, half a year seasons are well and truly gone, and that saddens me. When I was a kid and my favourite shows came from Disney Channel, I always couldn’t wait for Friday afternoon. That was the primetime spot for new episodes of whatever big show they were promoting at the time. I’d spend all week trying to come up with theories of how the previous cliffhangers could be solved or if the couple that had broken up in the last episode had broken up for good. I was hoping this would continue to be the case as I got older, but it’s not. TV shows used to have more mystery. It’s not the same to end an episode with something surprising, only to be able to resolve it immediately by clicking the next button.
This raises a wider concern as to where society’s patience has gone. We can’t watch a TV show or film nowadays without being on our phones. I’m also guilty of this. I’ve had to rewind shows countless times because I’ve missed an important plot point from being on my phone. This worries me; it seems like seasons are shorter and our attention spans are shrinking with them. Perhaps reboots keep getting made to accommodate this.
The only shows that typically last longer on mainstream TV nowadays are in the reality genre. Two successful cases of this are Love Island (2015) and Big Brother (2000), both of which, in their current form, are reboots of shows from the 2000s. Now, I believe that these shows present even worse instances of misogyny and discriminatory language than any fictional show from the past that might have questionable behaviour. Quite frankly, I’m more offended by a real-life person causing emotional distress to another real-life person than I am by a TV character, because at least the TV character can’t take to social media to defend their terrible actions, like many reality TV villains do.
British non-reality TV differs from that in the US, in the sense that reboots seemingly do not exist. British sitcoms (or Brit-coms as they are known) have never particularly changed format. Most shows consist of six half-an-hour episodes per season, and this has been the case since at least the 1960s. We’ve never had long seasons be a feature of many Brit-coms. We also don’t tend to give these Brit-coms reboots, opting for specials as resolution instead. Last Christmas, it was Gavin & Stacey (2007) and Outnumbered (2007) that said their final goodbyes, several years after the conclusion of both shows. Only Fools And Horses (1981) consistently had specials, airing up until 2003, twelve years after its finale. Fawlty Towers (1975) now has a West End play, with the original script from three episodes, omitting the scenes with offensive language as opposed to rewriting the entire show. It’s kept its essence, whilst also modernising. The only successful spin-off or reboot I can think of is Still Open All Hours (2013), a Brit-com that actually ran for longer than its original series, Open All Hours (1976).
There’s nothing wrong with a reboot. The demand is there. But they don’t cure our nostalgia. What’s more is that there are plenty of great TV shows coming out every single day. When we dwell too much on the past, we forget to enjoy the present. So yes, we can still fondly smile as we watch our favourite old TV shows again. But we should also appreciate them for what they are, shows of the past, and we should be grateful for the shows of today. Someday in the future, someone out there is going to switch on an episode of Bridgerton or The Summer I Turned Pretty and think to themselves, “I wish TV shows today were as good as they were in 2025!”
Not everything needs a reboot.
Edited by Hannah Tang, Co-Editor of Film & TV
