5 Sitcom Reboots That Time Forgot
As Fuller House, The Conners and Frasier — by that, we mean the crappier Frasier — have illustrated, no sitcom is ever truly finished, so long as it’s still profitable and the majority of its cast members haven’t been canceled.
There’s certainly been a glut of sitcom reboots in recent years. I mean, does anyone even remember that they brought back Murphy Brown for an 11th season?
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A lot of people might assume that this is a new trend, and a symptom of our current nostalgia-obsessed culture, but these throwback cash-grabs go way, way back. Some sitcom reboots have been completely forgotten about at this point, such as…
The New Leave it to Beaver
Unchecked Boomer nostalgia for the 1950s gave us the ‘80s revival The New Leave It to Beaver. But instead of an adorable child, Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver is now a middle-aged divorcee with two kids who has to move back in with his mom after losing his job. Don’t let the laugh track fool you, it’s deeply depressing.
Get Smart
In 1995, Fox brought back the stars of Get Smart for a sequel TV series that, regrettably, focused on the adventures of Maxwell Smart and Agent 99’s son Zach, as played by Andy Dick. It only lasted for seven episodes before the network put it out of its misery.
The Honeymooners: Second Honeymoon
Two decades after the original series, the cast of The Honeymooners appeared in four TV specials, the first of which was 1976’s The Honeymooners: Second Honeymoon. Unfortunately for Ralph and Alice Kramden, they’re still living in the same dingy apartment all those years later, with no modern appliances.
Weirder still, the special is about Ralph suspecting that Alice is pregnant, despite the fact that she’s clearly in her mid-to-late 50s while he’s pushing 60 (and extremely tanned for a Brooklyn bus driver). It’s not like they’re supposed to be playing younger versions of the characters, because Ralph and Alice celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary in the special.
The Bradys
Since The Brady Bunch was a fun comedy that most people liked, naturally the franchise was rebooted as a bleak family dramedy. The first episode of the 1990 series The Bradys finds Bobby Brady getting into a race car accident that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down. That’s how they opened the entire series.
The show was canceled before they had the chance to kill Mike Brady off in a tragic helicopter accident. That’s not a joke, that’s literally what was going to happen.
The Bob Newhart Show: The 19th Anniversary Special
While this was just a one-off TV special, and not a full series, The Bob Newhart Show’s “19th Anniversary Special” is a notable oddity because it combined clips of the original series with a sequel episode in which Bob worries that he’s losing his mind.
Why? Well, remember the iconic ending to Newhart, in which we see that the entire show was a just dream?
The follow-up illustrates just how existentially terrifying it would be to dream eight years-worth of someone else’s life in a single night.
