What is old can always become new again. As we move into yet another era of streaming TV, producers and television writers keep returning to the well of classic television to craft a new hit from an old property. 1965’s Lost in Space returned in 2018 with a new take, Paramount+ had Jordan Peele make a new Twilight Zone in 2019, and Netflix is getting back in the reboot game by rebooting prairie soap classic Little House on the Prairie from showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine. With almost 75 years of classic TV history behind us, there are many, many more classic shows that deserve a second (or even third!) look.
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The cut-off of ‘when’ classic TV ends and contemporary TV begins is often debated; much as we millennials may not like it, the shows we grew up with are almost all, or nearly, 30 years old! With that in mind, the shows this list will spotlight have to have begun airing by 1995. This list will also try to avoid shows that have already gotten multiple chances at a reboot, and try to pursue some, hopefully, surprising choices along the way.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
It may feel odd to start this list with a show that was created around a personality (the late Mary Tyler Moore), but The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977) quickly evolved to become less of a show focused on the trials and tribulations of Mary Richards (Moore) and her turbulent love life, and much more of a workplace comedy with a full ensemble that had the tendency to hit hard when it needed to. This wouldn’t be a 1:1 reboot, by any means, but there are plenty of funny comediennes around who could lead a workplace comedy set at some kind of news organization. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set around the operations of local television station WJM, which made sense in the 70s; maybe it’s time for a sitcom set around a big YouTube channel?
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
The fun of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965) is that while the anthology show had the heft and flavor of Alfred Hitchcock behind it, so many other writers and directors passed through its ten years that it genuinely became more than just Hitchcock’s show. He was more an enabler of other talents, than anything else. Anthology shows have become more popular over the years, but they’re usually someone’s sole property: Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, for example. It might be fun to see Alfred Hitchcock Presents rebooted with a contemporary director similar to Hitchcock as the ‘face.’ My vote is David Fincher, but I could also see a director like The Substance‘s Coralie Fargeat bringing her own flair to a series like this.
Babylon 5
Okay, so this one is a bit of a cheat. It made headlines when Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski and Warner Bros. announced a reboot of the ’90s sci-fi show was being pursued. But that was pre-David Zaslav, and there is every indication that the reboot is now dead, although Straczynski was still pushing hope as late as February 2024. The original show ran from 1994-1998 and feels eerily prescient when rewatching it today. The core of the series, after all, is about a galactic fight of good vs. evil that impacts the politics of every known world, including Earth. Hopefully, if a reboot does move forward, it won’t try to retread old ground too much. There’s a lot of universe that could be covered.
M*A*S*H
This might be the most controversial choice to reboot here, but M*A*S*H (1972-1983) was a show created to be a unique comedic dialogue with the challenges of its time, and it never shied away from those challenges. It couldn’t be a straight reboot, but maybe a new show inspired by its unflinching ability to look and point at problems and have a good laugh could be a welcome thing, in these times. A lot has been made of Max’s new The Pitt being a spiritual reboot of ER: grittier, but also more conscious of social issues and their impact on the medical field. There could easily be a similar show for M*A*S*H, combining wartime medicine, comedy and drama while addressing the issues we face as a society today.
Get Smart
Get Smart (1965-1970) got a film reboot in 2008, but it wasn’t that smart (or successful). While its spy contemporary Mission: Impossible turns out to make great movies, Get Smart itself relied on the fact that each of its convoluted plots could be solved in under 30 minutes (or an hour, if Max and Agent 99 got more time). A lot of spy shows today are gritty and edgy; Get Smart itself was launched because of the Bond franchise’s popularity at the time. Bond back then wasn’t Daniel Craig’s Bond, but the franchise still took itself seriously. Maybe too seriously, Get Smart co-creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry proposed. The key to any reboot here is a cast with serious chemistry: while Don Adams and Barbara Feldon made a compelling duo, Edward Platt as The Chief, and their boss, also created more opportunities for comedic mishaps.
L. A. Law
Why should New York get all the legal drama fun? While Law & Order continues to go long as a franchise, a show like L. A. Law (1986-1994) seems to fade into memory. There’s plenty of room for more legal dramas on TV; while it may feel like a genre that’s slowly going the way medical dramas were going (until The Pitt), the law has never been more relevant. While an L. A. Law made today might look and feel very different than its 80s and 90s ancestor, a show like the reboot of Perry Mason (2020-2023) did encourage the idea that shows made in Los Angeles and about Los Angeles are still fertile ground for drama.
Dr. Kildare
The character of Dr. Kildare was originally created by American pulp fiction author Max Brand, and that quickly caught the attention of MGM in the 30s. He would appear in various films, serials and radio shows through the 1950s. Dr. Kildare (1961-1966) was seen as an opportunity to launch young star Richard Chamberlain, and it became a hit. It could trend towards the more soapy in its handling of medical crises, but it inspired a lot of the medical dramas that would come after it, with its young doctor protagonist learning the ropes in a busy hospital. As medical dramas seem to come back in style, it might be fun to reboot the Kildare character; and there is nothing that says he has to be a man, anymore, either.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
Kolchak: The Night Stalker might be television’s first one-season wonder. Only airing for a single season of TV from 1974 to ’75, it became a cult hit and even inspired later sci-fi shows like The X-Files. With the paranormal and the weird always popular topics, it might be time to bring back Carl Kolchak to the small screen. It’s more interesting than your standard cop paranormal procedural, too, because Kolchak is a wire news reporter. Now, he might be rewritten as an online content creator of some kind, but the key point is that his investigations happen in the pursuit of some kind of truth and spreading it across the airwaves. There was a reboot attempted in 2005, but it struggled to succeed. With how unlimited TV has gotten, who knows what a Kolchak could look like today?
Are there any shows you think would be huge hits if they were rebooted today? Shout them out in the comments!
