NBC just cancelled Ironside and did that lesson teach them that maybe TV remakes of old TV shows aren’t such a good idea? Hell no! They’ve just green lit new remakes of “Remington Steele” and “Murder, She Wrote.” Yikes…
Don’t get me wrong, TV adaptations are hotter than ever (The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, even True Blood) and so are TV “translations” (i.e. importing a foreign show like Homeland or The Bridge to America), but remaking an old American TV show into a new American TV show faces a unique set of challenges. Behold…
5. Older Viewers Literally Don’t Matter…Who might remember Ironside or the original Hawaii Five O (one of the very few TV remakes to make it past the first season…and also on the oldest skewing broadcast network, not a coincidence)? Old people–I mean, older people. And the advertisers literally only care about 18-to-49 year olds. They don’t measure viewers who are fifty or over. That’s why a show like Harry’s Law can be both NBC’s highest rated show (at that time) and their lowest rated show (at that time). They had millions of viewers, but not many of them were in that key 18-to-49 year old demographic which is all advertisers care about. TV remakes are, of course, going to skew a lot older since they’re essentially nostalgia TV, and that brings in an audience the networks may not even want. So why build a whole show around it?
4. They’re Between a Rock and a Hard Place…There’s the rock (that older viewers think the original was better and the new one is inferior and quit watching) and then there’s the hard place (younger viewers don’t even know about the original or care about it). TV remakes leave half the audience disappointed and the other half apathetic.
3. There’s Already Plenty of Nostalgia Networks…Due to the rise of basic cable television, hundreds of channels now have to fill up hours and hours of programming. The easiest solution? To broadcast old episodes of old TV shows and hope even ten people watch them. If my grandparents really want to watch Murder, She Wrote, then they’ll probably do so on TV Land or the daytime hours of TNT or any network that’s showing the original, not a new one on NBC at 10 p.m. when they might be asleep. [Also, from what I understand about nostalgia TV, half of the appeal is in watching something you’ve already seen before and trying to remember exactly what happened.]
2. Broadcast TV is Repetitive Enough Already…A big part of the rise of cable dramas is because broadcast TV has already gotten so stale. [You’ll notice that FX and AMC aren’t interested in remakes of Matlock or Perry Mason.] Even a “new” show feels very old because they essentially only show procedurals or soap operas or comedies centered around wacky families or thirty year olds pretending to be twenty year olds. Every episode of a show like Bones or Castle or Law and Order: Whatever or pretty much any show on CBS that’s not The Good Wife already feels like a rerun even if it’s brand-new. Why watch a remake of a procedural show that really feels like a rerun?
1. Old TV Isn’t Good…I know it’s blasphemy to admit that anything wasn’t “better back then,” but TV really wasn’t. The culture wars will forever rage over exactly when movies and music started to lose creativity, but just about every critic worth listening to is saying that right now is a golden age of television. In the last decade you’ve had The Sopranos, The Wire, Rome, Deadwood, The Shield, King of the Hill, Lost, and Breaking Bad, and I would put ANY of these shows up to be considered for the all-time greats list. I may not have quite the same reverence for Homeland, The Good Wife, Boardwalk Empire, or Game of Thrones, but there’s no question that they’re 100 times better than just about any show that existed in the ’60’s or even 70’s.
TV remakes operate off the faulty premise that there are things worth remaking from old TV and further encourage the lie that we’re not living in a better time period for TV. That’s because—-as with all nostalgia—-they’re not really seeing things clearly. They say “Boy, wasn’t this old cop show from back then amazing?” And back then it was amazing, when there were three channels and one of them had Flipper on it. But none of those shows could survive in today’s more competitive and creative TV landscape. That’s why the new Ironside “doesn’t feel quite right,” because they’re not remembering the old Ironside quite right either.