For all the rhapsodizing about Peak TV, our so-called Golden Age of Television, not nearly enough criticism is leveled at its underbelly: the endless onslaught of reboots.
It’s a phenomenon that began at the box office in the 1980s, when every Top 10-grossing film generated a sequel, and it’s now cross-pollinated to an epic degree.
Let’s look at the past week alone: “Baywatch,” a film reboot of the surf soap opera starring David Hasselhoff, opened in theaters to a 19 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and withering reviews. “Even emptier than its source material,” said The A.V. Club. “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” was widely panned as a lazy, cynical cash grab — “Depp Should Walk the Plank for Disastrous New ‘Pirates,’ ” said The Post — but if it does well enough at the box office, no doubt there’ll be a sixth.
Last Wednesday, ABC aired a remake of the 1987 hit film “Dirty Dancing.” It was another critical dud but still pulled in 6.6 million viewers. On May 21, Showtime premiered its highly hyped reboot of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” It’s apparently as much of a cult phenomenon now as then, with a mere 506,000 viewers tuning in.
Somehow, it’s become easier to write off the lack of originality in film: Technology and market forces have, at least since 2008, demanded movies that appeal to mainstream global audiences, ones with familiar heroes and villains, minimal dialogue, spectacular effects.
Nuanced, more complicated films are increasingly picked up by streaming services, their billions of dollars allowing for creative risks such as last year’s Oscar-winning “Manchester by the Sea,” distributed by Amazon.com, or this week’s “War Machine,” brought to you by Netflix.
“It’s an extreme brand of loss aversion,” director Steven Soderbergh said of studios in 2013. “It’s just frustrating because the trickle-down effect is, creatively, things are getting narrower.”
This now applies to TV, as well. Just a few of the reboots slated for 2017 include “American Idol” (which just left us last year), “Will & Grace,” “Roseanne,” “Dynasty” and a TV version of “Heathers.”
We have no shortage of revived game shows, from “Family Feud” to “The $100,000 Pyramid” to “Match Game” to “Love Connection.”
Scripted series in development include a TV version of Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” plus reboots of far older, beloved television classics: “The Honeymooners,” “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons.”
Even HBO, which prides itself on risk-taking, is so dependent on “Game of Thrones” that the network recently announced four different spinoffs.
Why such overwhelming stagnation, such reliance on pre-existing material? Soderbergh, in his 2013 State of Cinema address, theorized that the nation, traumatized by two wars and the Great Recession, wants what’s familiar. “I still think the country is in some form of PTSD about [9/11], and that we haven’t really healed in any sort of complete way,” he said.
“People are working longer hours for less money, and maybe when they get in a movie” — or a TV show — “they want a break.”
To be fair, there are rare reboots that not only retain their source material’s DNA but expand upon it — FX’s “Fargo” is the best example. Yet most every other reboot of a classic, from “Gilmore Girls” to “Arrested Development” to “Twin Peaks,” can’t help but leave a sour aftertaste.
Each of these shows worked because they were born of a specific time and place: the shifting structure of the American family, the absurdism of corporate greed and war profiteering, the post-Reagan anxieties of a new decade, the Cold War ostensibly over. To airdrop them into 2017 not only strips them of their cultural moorings but implies those things were irrelevant.
It’s telling that the one show that is least likely to reboot is among the most popular of all: “Friends,” which went off the air in 2004. Star Jennifer Aniston explained the nostalgia for such a short while ago, and what “Friends” represents now.
“There was something about a time where our faces weren’t shoved into cellphones and we weren’t, like, checking Facebooks and Instagram, and we were in a room together, or at a coffee shop together, and we were talking . . . having conversations. And we’ve lost that.”
And there’s no going back.