I think the problem with the Murphy Brown revival (I’ll try to stay away from getting too political) was that the earlier show was from a time when you could still poke fun at people on the other side of the aisle, while by the time of the later show things were much more grave and it was harder to mine comedy from that. Perhaps I’m just elaborating on what you’ve already said.
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Damn right. I want to know why Mariette Hartley has two navels.
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Because they couldn’t show any lady’s navels in Star Trek.
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Speaking of revivals and @Madptarmigan (love that name): The Disney+ sequel series to Willow (“Hey, I liked Willow!”) was pretty good.
It’s a shame they couldn’t get Val Kilmer back, but they did a good job working around that both by making Madmartigan a frequent topic of discussion and driving character force, and by bringing in Val Kilmer’s son to do the voice.
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With help from AI, apparently.
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There was a flashback scene that needed some CG in order to add a few extra lines to a scene from the original movie, but that didn’t involve Madmartigen. They just had Jack Kilmer do the voice when needed.
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They used AI on the voice too:
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Cannot stand this. I turn off any commercial that comes on touting it, and they play it constantly.
Night Court was good because of the people in it, and now that Markie and Harry have passed, it seems rather bad taste to “continue it.”
People in Hollywood need to get off their asses and make new content and stop poaching from the '80s and '90s.
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Charles “Mac” Robinson is also, sadly, no longer with us.
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Considering two, not one but two, main actors died while filming the series, that’s an odd position to take. While I agree the remake fever is getting tiresome, actors passing is not a cause to shelve a possible reboot in perpetuity.
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When I heard they were rebooting Night Court, I thought to myself, “Are they just stealing ideas from 30 Rock now?” My thought was confirmed when it was announced that TLC was airing a show that was basically MILF Island (a show within a show on 30 Rock). If they start airing Homonym, I may just lose it.
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Just wait until you can buy the trivection oven this Christmas.
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I am so sick of reboots of good shows. They were good in their original iteration! Leave them alone and come up with your own idea!
Ahem. Sorry. I keep seeing these things happening and, with very few exceptions, the whole purpose seems to be to either destroy the original characters, kill them off, both of those, or to “update it for modern audiences”. It’s so tedious.
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And it’s always been happening, too. There’s a reason Fred Allen said “Imitation is the sincerest form of television”.
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The only recent American reboot I’ve enjoyed was the new Hawai’i Five-0. It worked. The chemistry between Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan was friggin amazing and that sold everything else. I didn’t even mind the gender switch for Kono it worked so well.
The updated version of All Creatures Great and Small is also really good.
The new MacGyver? Terrible.
Magnum? Awful (mostly because they insisted on having the whole will they/won’t they nonsense with Higgins) Which is a shame as Jay Hernandez does a good job as Magnum.
Battlestar Galactica? No thanks. I liked the cheesy silly fun of the original, not the po-faced, dour remake.
Kung Fu? Has nothing whatsoever to do with either the original or the 90’s KU: The Legend Continues
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I’m waiting for Gold Case.
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I just want to throw in another favorite Fred Allen quote, ”Television is called a new medium, and I have discovered why they call it a medium – because nothing is well done .”
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It’s rough for those '70s and '80s androids. They’re still around but they look really old!
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You’re too kind 
. Especially to the Willow series, which was a meatloaf of fantasy genre cliches with the burnt Hunt’s Ketchup of the Chosen One trope all over it. The one thing it did a little out of the ordinary was feature an openly queer relationship where neither party died.
If you want another example of Abram’s Knife, check out Jade’s parentage in Willow. It’s never really set up, it very conveniently gets them out of a tight spot, and then is never discussed again.
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