25 Television Shows That Were Resurrected

Mitchell Hurwitz’s irreverent family comedy was an immediate critical success, but it struggled throughout its three-season run to expand its audience. It had one of the most fiercely loyal fan bases in television history, which helped give the show a second life on Netflix in 2013, seven years after Fox had canceled it. The extent to which the comeback was a creative success is still being debated: some felt it was a little too loose and meandering; others found it even more audacious than its network run. Its enduring popularity has earned it a fifth season, announced for 2018.

The mother-daughter adventures of Lorelei (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) Gilmore captivated a solid core of viewers right out of the gate, and its ratings improved over time until it was one of the WB’s most successful shows. The sharp banter and genuine characterizations kept fans watching right up until the end of Season 7, when the CW canceled it due to the ratings not justifying the expense of the show. Fans were heartbroken, but Netflix got the gang back together in 2016 for a four-part miniseries that pleased just about no one.

The ratings anchor of ABC’s popular TGIF lineup in the late 1980s and early ‘90s lived a long, happy, eight-season existence without an ounce of critical acclaim. It was formula sitcom garbage in which a widowed father gets his brother and best friend to help him raise his three daughters (the youngest, Michelle, was famously played by the twin duo of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen). Riding the wave of millennial nostalgia, Netflix brought the series back in 2016 as “Fuller House”, and it was a hit again. We’ll never be rid of this dreadful show.

The original Star Trek series had a quasi-resurrection itself when fans petitioned to save the show after the end of its second season in 1968. Alas, the series never caught on with more than hardcore science fiction fans, and the show was discontinued. But syndication turned “Star Trek” into a pop cultural juggernaut, leading to a series of blockbuster movies. Eager to build on the franchise’s newfound success, Paramount greenlit “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, which takes place 100 years after the start of the old Enterprise’s five-year mission. Suddenly, “Star Trek” was a cash cow, with multiple spin-offs following in TNG’s wake.

A massive post-9/11 hit, Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran’s “24” rode an ingenious concept to a healthy eight-season run on Fox. Each season was built around twenty-four hours in the life of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), and though it often struggled to keep the concept credible, the writers knew how to keep the action coming and the plot moving. As with any hit show, viewers gradually grew tired of the gimmick, prompting Fox to cancel the show in 2010. But there was still enough enthusiasm to generate the twelve-episode “24: Live Another Day” in 2014, and the spinoff  “24: Legacy” in 2016.

“Prison Break” was a sharp concept for a single season of television: An innocent man is sentenced to die, and the only person who can save him is his brother, who happens to be a brilliant structural engineer. The brother commits armed robbery to get thrown into the same maximum-security prison, and, voila, it’s a season-long “Escape from Alcatraz”. How they got four seasons out of this gimmick is a credit to the writers; how it got resurrected in 2017 is a testament to the paucity of original ideas in network television.

Anyone old enough to remember 1986 surely recalls the twentieth anniversary celebration of The Monkees – and probably not fondly. MTV went way overboard, airing countless marathons of the original series and promoting their new LP/tour. There’s nothing wrong with The Monkees. In moderation. The same cannot be said of “The New Monkees”, a misbegotten attempt to capitalize on the craze. The new band’s music was uninspired synth-pop, and the thirteen episodes that made it to air were wretched. This was probably the worst resurrection in television history.

The James Bond-inspired “Mission: Impossible” was a long-running ABC television show (1966 – 1973) decades before it turned into Tom Cruise’s go-to film franchise. It also enjoyed a revival before transitioning to the big-screen, though the reasons for the resurrection were quite dubious. In 1988, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for 155 days, forcing networks to scramble for unscripted or previously written material. ABC shamelessly reached into the vaults for old “Mission: Impossible” scripts, and brought the show back for two forgettable seasons.

The classic nighttime soap opera that ran for fourteen seasons (1978–1991) was brought back to life by TNT in 2012 for a largely underwhelming three-season run. It was fun to check in on the ruthless oil baron J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman, who passed away before the start of the third season), but the old zing just wasn’t there. It certainly never caught fire like the original, which produced the second highest rated prime time broadcast ever with the resolution of the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger.

Aaron Spelling’s “Beverly Hills 90210” appeared headed for cancellation after its first season when Fox had the genius notion to air a “summer season”, which took advantage of a lack of competition and, let’s be honest, the allure of seeing its young cast frolic on the beach in bikinis and swimsuits. The show became a phenomenon that lasted ten seasons, which made it an ideal reboot property in 2008. The new version brought back some of the old crew during the first season, but quickly abandoned them to focus on the new kids. “90210” was never particularly popular, but still managed to hang on for five seasons.

One year after bringing back “90210”, the CW took a crack at its old spinoff, “Melrose Place”, to largely disastrous results. Absent the bitchy snap of the original show’s creator, Darren Star, this new variation quickly lost the interest of viewers. The producers threw a Hail Mary halfway through the season when they brought on Heather Locklear to reprise the role of her backstabbing hellion, Amanda Woodward. But it was too late. The show only lasted eighteen episodes.

One of the most successful shows currently on television was nearly killed off in 2002 after three ratings-challenged seasons on Fox. Critics were split on the mean-spirited humor of Seth MacFarlane’s animated series, and the network seemed inclined to let it die when it placed the show opposite “Frasier”. “Family Guy” never had a fair shot at finding an audience early on, but when it became a syndication hit on Cartoon Network, Fox ordered new episodes in 2005. It’s now a highlight of the network’s Sunday “Animation Domination” lineup.

Matt Groening’s second animated series for Fox might’ve wowed critics in its first season, but it never came anywhere close to penetrating the popular culture like “The Simpsons”. One of the problems may have been its tendency towards brainy science-fiction jokes; it also lacked a troublemaking scamp like Bart or a lovable oaf like Homer. Fox threw in the towel after four seasons, but fan demand prompted Comedy Central to bring the show back in 2008 for three more seasons.

“Six seasons and a movie.” This was the mission statement of “Community” creator Dan Harmon, and, despite persistent low ratings, he’s close to fulfilling this promise. NBC tried to kill “Community” multiple times, but the show’s passionate fan base – which happened to comprise a valuable marketing demographic – kept slipping the noose. After two seasons of half-hearted thirteen-episode orders, Harmon (who was fired from his own show for the entire fourth season) was forced to take the show to Yahoo! for its final hurrah. 

No genre has produced more revivals and reboots than the game show, but it’s hard to beat “The Match Game” for sheer persistence. The show was at its peak in the 1970s when host Gene Rayburn would field bawdy double entendres from the likes of Richard Dawson, Rip Taylor, Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Nipsey Russell and Gary Burghoff (many of whom smoked on the air, as was completely acceptable at the time). The latest primetime revival on ABC is hosted by Alec Baldwin, but today’s lax broadcast standards have rendered the show quaint.

Was anyone asking for this? After a successful first season, Tim Kring’s “Heroes” quickly hemorrhaged viewers until barely anyone was watching at the end of its fourth and final season. The regular-people-become-superheroes hook was fun at first, but the writers couldn’t keep the show from becoming convoluted and, ultimately, nonsensical. Kring hoped that a limited series would focus the storytelling, so NBC gave him another shot in 2015 with "Heroes Reborn". It was poorly reviewed, and all but the die-hard fans stayed away.

Jim Henson’s original “The Muppet Show” was one of the rare network shows to appeal to just about every conceivable demographic, so why have producers struggled so mightily to connect with a wide swath of viewers who dearly love these characters? 1996’s “Muppets Tonight” came closest to recapturing the charm of the old series, but it only lasted a couple of seasons. That’s better than “The Muppets”, which premiered in 2015 as a single-camera “mockumentary” comedy in the style of “The Office”. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t exactly feel right. Ratings were poor from the start, and it was canceled after one season.

Chris Carter’s “The X-Files” was far from a hit when it premiered on Fox in the fall of 1993, but over time the science fiction show, centered on the paranormal investigations of FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, became one of the top-rated shows on television, spawning a hit movie and running a solid nine seasons. The series has remained popular among its considerable fan base, which was good enough to inspire a six-episode revival in 2016. The new series varies wildly in quality, but as long as the fans keep watching, “The X-Files” will be out there.

Another wholly uncalled-for revival, this update of the terrible ABC sitcom “Boy Meets World” managed to mine millennial nostalgia for three seasons (ending in early 2017). The original was, along with “Full House”, one of the most popular shows in the network’s TGIF lineup, but it was pure formula propped up by stale setup-punchline writing. Surprisingly, “Girl Meets World” was generally well reviewed, suggesting that the new writers tapped into something more genuine than ever existed in the original.

The faith-based WB show received the quickest revival in network history when its tenth season finale, intended to be its last episode, drew shockingly large ratings. The newly-formed CW had just inherited the show, and had announced its cancellation prior to the finale, but they quickly had second thoughts and brought the series back for one last go-round. Unfortunately, the show couldn’t build on its newfound momentum, and, thanks to multiple schedule changes, it finally flamed out.

The cult British series got a jolt of new life in 2005 when, after a sixteen-year hiatus, writer-producer Russell T. Davies gave the old TARDIS a fresh coat of paint, brought in talented scenarists like Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis, and hired Christopher Eccleston to be the Ninth Doctor. The series has been running like gangbusters ever since, though some Doctors have been more popular than others (David Tennant’s run being the most celebrated).

This was a full-scale reimagining of Glen A. Larson’s short-lived 1978 sci-fi series (greenlit in the wake of a little thing called “Star Wars”), and it ran for four critically acclaimed seasons. Fans immediately fell in love with the new iterations of Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) and the cocky Viper pilot Starbuck (played by Katee Sackhoff in an inspired bit of gender-swap casting). The new series inspired a spinoff (“Caprica”), and now overshadows its original inspiration.

“Still the Beaver” was initially envisioned as a one-off TV movie, but when the 1983 CBS broadcast drew huge ratings, Universal Television kept the cast together and packaged a full season with The Disney Channel (before moving over to TBS). Starring all of the surviving cast members, the show reintroduced viewers to the gentle whimsy of the original series, and its inoffensive sensibility was right in step with the Reagan Era.

“WKRP in Cincinnati” is arguably one of the greatest sitcoms in television history, so "The New WKRP in Cincinnati", a warmed-over syndicated cash-in, was always doomed to pale in comparison. But it was far worse than could have been imagined, even with the return of Gordon Jump, Richard Sanders, Frank Bonner and Dr. Johnny Fever himself, Howard Hesseman. The revival lasted two seasons before disappearing to the disappointment of no one.

Though the original series only lasted three seasons (1976 – 1979), “What’s Happening!!” became a huge hit in syndication, so creator Eric Monte relaunched his “Cooley High” inspired show in 1985 as "What's Happening Now!!". The entire main cast came back for the first season, but the show took a serious hit in its second season when fan favorite Fred “Rerun” Berry quit over a contract dispute. The series never recovered, though it did introduce audiences to a young Martin Lawrence during its third season.