Reboots are the new norm, but they’re doing our nostalgia a disservice
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It seems like I’m always hearing about a new reboot of a show I used to love watching as a kid – “iCarly,” “Raven’s Home,” “Bel-Air,” the failed “Lizzie McGuire” revival series. Just a few weeks ago, Disney Channel announced that “Wizards of Waverly Place” would be the latest show to get a sequel series.
Even – or especially – as such a huge fan of the original show, I was less than enthusiastic about the news. After years of continuous live-action film remakes, TV reboots, sequels, spin-offs and the general sense that the industry keeps inventing excuses not to make new, original content, I’m jaded. I’m tired of seeing the nostalgia of my generation being used to rake in profit and, worst of all, make a show that rarely lives up to the original.
It’s not that this hasn’t been happening for decades. Reboot culture is so commonplace that even I’m surprised they’re still the topic of discourse.
As an overarching umbrella, reboots describe any rebranding of an original project, though what we typically end up with is a reset that ignores all the narrative continuity of the original. Sometimes it morphs into a spin-off, following a singular character from the original cast in a new location, like “Joey” based on the “Friends” character or “Frasier” from “Cheers.” Other times, it jumps ahead to see where the original cast ends up in modern-day. Or it may bring in new characters, like “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” and the new “Wizards of Waverly Place” series.
From an economic standpoint, it makes sense to rely on existing intellectual property, or IP, because you have an established audience and therefore lower marketing and publicity costs. If it’s a familiar name, face or universe, people are more likely to tune in, whereas new content is almost always a toss-up. As a bonus, reboots have been shown to cause an uptick in subscriptions to streaming services that are distributing the content, enabling other services to continue to support and cash in. Everybody, including the viewers, supposedly wins.
Nostalgia has also proven itself to be a powerful marketing tool. Communications Professor Makana Chock, who has taught at Syracuse University for 19 years and conducted groundbreaking research in media psychology, shares that this “sentimental longing for the past and affection for memories of our childhood” can play a major role in determining the content we consume as adults.
“Particularly when people are going through stressful times, there’s this desire to turn back and re-experience that sense of simpler times, particularly if you were a child or maybe a younger person who was not yet facing a lot of the complexities and challenges that were going on around you,” she says.
The problem, however, is that nostalgia is being taken advantage of at rates like never before in the industry. Perhaps I’m more chronically online than I used to be or it’s just that I’m older and more aware, but new TV reboots always seem to be announced or in production.
Oftentimes, profit and reliance on name recognition are prioritized over actual quality storytelling, cheapening what might otherwise have been an opportunity to return to familiar places and people we know. Whether we came into it feeling excited or frustrated, we’re more often than not left feeling disappointed. And while there are ways nostalgia can warp our memories, the quality of a piece of media from the past is often less important than how it made us feel the first time we watched it.
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“People have these wonderful memories of what the stories were like and may feel disappointed that they don’t appeal in the same way or don’t feel as good,” Chock says.
To me, however, reboots aren’t being made just because they guarantee a return on investment or because they want to continue the legacy of a successful show to new viewers. They’re also capitalizing on everything young people lost during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – time, normal adult development and opportunities for socialization – so much so that it’s been dubbed a “pandemic time skip.”
It’s no wonder that we want to return to the past. After feeling like we were stuck in a time lapse for three years, many of us have no idea how to be functional adults in the world that, thanks to additional factors like geopolitical conflict, economic uncertainty and global climate imbalance, seems to be crumbling around us.
“One of the advantages of age is that you’ve lived through enough traumas that you know that you can continue to do so,” Chock says. “But the first time it happens, it hits particularly hard because then you have to figure out what you’re going to do and how you rebuild from this. So there’s this perception that there’s a need for ‘comfort food,’ including reboots of formerly popular shows.”
One of the advantages of today’s television landscape is that we aren’t in the world of cable anymore where we only have access to three channels recycling the same programming. We aren’t obligated to watch anything we don’t want to and are more likely to have more choices than not enough.
In that way, we have power too, not only to choose what we watch and support, but also how we reconnect with our inner child. Maybe we do that by watching the originals instead of the reboots or looking through the early years of our social media or asking to see old photographs and physical mementos from our childhood. In essence, it’s about finding healthy ways to honor how we’ve grown despite circumstances outside of our control.
So while reboots might not be going anyway any time soon, here’s hoping studios will, at the very least, understand what we’re nostalgic for and make content our younger selves would actually want to watch.
Sofia Aguilar is a first-year grad student in the Library and Information Science program. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at saguilar07@syr.edu.
