Written by Jon Williams
Next week, on Tuesday, March 27,
Roseanne
will return to television screens. The beloved sitcom originally ran for nine
seasons from 1988 through 1997. Now it’s coming back with a nine-episode season
that will feature the show’s original cast—which creates some interesting
dilemmas, since two actresses played the character of Becky (the second,
Sarah
Chalke, will appear as a different character) and Dan, played by
John
Goodman, died in the original final season of the show (he’s back). Other
familiar faces returning to the show include
Laurie
Metcalf, fresh off her Academy Award nomination for
Lady
Bird,
Sandra
Bernhard,
Big
Bang Theory star
Johnny
Galecki, and, of course,
Roseanne
Barr herself.
Television is widely considered to be in a new golden age,
with an incredible amount of high-quality content being created. With the rise
of streaming services producing shows of their own in addition to more
traditional cable and broadcast channels, competition for viewers is at an
all-time high, and the television industry is frequently looking to the past to
fill its slate. Everything old is new again as reboots and revivals, like
Roseanne, are popping up everywhere.
Another popular sitcom that has returned is
Will
& Grace, which originally aired from 1998 through 2006. After a ten-minute
one-off proved to be wildly popular in 2016, the show was brought back to series
in the fall of 2017. The first revival season will come to a close next week,
and the show has already been renewed for a second and third season. Likewise,
Full
House, which ran from 1987 through 1995, has been brought back as
Fuller
House, following the adult lives of the characters who were children in
the original show. The new show is three seasons in and going strong.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to sitcoms. Earlier this week,
the second revival season of
The
X-Files came to a close. Originally running from 1993 to 2002, the
sci-fi series about a pair of FBI agents tracking down leads on alien
visitation was brought back for a six-episode limited
event
series in 2016 before this year’s ten-episode set. With
Gillian
Anderson bowing out and
David
Duchovny open to returning, it’s unclear if the show will continue further.
In the drama category,
Twin Peaks was
also revived for a limited
event
series in 2017 following
two
seasons in 1990-91 and the movie
Fire
Walk with Me in 1992. And the dramedy series
Gilmore
Girls was brought back for the four-episode miniseries
A
Year in the Life in 2016 following its original seven-season run from
2000 through 2007.
And there are more revivals in the works. It was recently
announced that
Murphy Brown will be
back on television later this year, with
Candice
Bergen and the show’s original cast returning to explore the state of
television journalism in the current climate. Although nothing has been
finalized,
Paul
Reiser and
Helen
Hunt are in talks to team back up for new episodes of
Mad
About You, nineteen years after that show’s seeming end. And don’t
forget about reboots, in which series concepts are reused in different, usually
updated circumstances, starting with a new cast. Some of those we can look
forward to include
Cagney & Lacey,
Magnum
P.I.,
Charmed,
The
Greatest American Hero, and
Lost
in Space, not to mention recent rumors about
Buffy
the Vampire Slayer.
With all of these classic shows returning to small screens
in one form or another, and more sure to follow, patrons will be looking for
the original shows to catch up or just to relive old favorites. You can find
them on our website, and count on us to bring you the revivals and reboots as
they become available. Are there any other series no longer on the air that you’d
like to see brought back? If so, keep the faith—it just might happen!