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In ‘Reboot,’ Everything Old Is New, to Streaming


At a recent meeting at Hulu’s office, alongside coffee and deluxe bottled water, half a dozen executives entertained a new series of movies. Well, not exactly new. Idea: A reboot of the beloved early ’00s comedy about a harmonious family, “Step Right Up”. Despite the abrupt end after the lead’s departure, the show surprisingly found a strong audience on streaming, especially among them, one analyst noted. , family and “live to laugh” quadrants.

“Are we sure it’s not just people who leave it to their dogs?” asked a colleague.

Her boss added one more concern: Is a reboot still a thing? His team responded to him with a very long list, including “Fuller House” “How I met your father,” “Veronica Mars,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Gossip Girl,” “The Miracle Years,” “Party of the Year”, “Party” and so on.

“What the hell,” said the master, convinced. “Let’s remake something original.”

This is the opening scene of “Reboot”, a half hour Hulu comedy from showrunner Steven Levitan (“Modern Family,” “Just shoot me!”) with a premise so perfect that it seems bananas that no one has thought of before. As an adaptation of a show, it features a multi-person family comedy, nested within a single-camera workplace comedy that is cast into a backstage Hollywood spoof. The series is also a referendum – quite an interesting one – on the path the sitcom has evolved over the past few decades and its transition from network to cable and streaming.

“This is really an affectionate look at our business,” Levitan said, speaking from a home office with “Modern Family” excerpts in the background. “Strange characters, weird situations, important meetings you have about something unbelievably trivial and embarrassing. It really is great food for comedy. “

Levitan first got the idea for “Reboot” a few years before “Roseanne” returned and then disappearedafter a racist tweet posted by its star, Roseanne Barr, and then come back againsans Barr, like “The Conners.” The behind-the-scenes play is said to have intrigued him.

“I remember thinking, Well, that’s the show I want to see,” he said. “Modern Family” still has a few seasons left. He assumed that someone else would have dreamed up the same idea during that time, but no one did. Or no one gets the green light, anyway. So he offered his pitch to Hulu. (He has a master deal with 20th Television, which, like Hulu, is part of the Walt Disney Company.)

I asked Karey Burke, president of 20th Television, who helped develop “Reboot,” if Hulu’s real-life moderators have ever expressed any apprehension about the show’s satire. (For example, there’s an amazing swipe at “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the pilot.)

“They love it,” she said. “And I didn’t know that other platforms would be able to handle zingers as gracefully as they have.”

Craig Erwich, president of ABC Entertainment, Hulu and Disney, confirmed this, saying that he and his real colleagues enjoyed the joke. “We love it,” he said. “So funny. And it’s funny because it’s probably true. “

Not all of these jokes are targeting streaming services. Many target the networks, where Levitan has spent most of his career. Others followed changes in the form of the sitcom itself. Many of these ended up being voiced as arguments between Paul Reiser’s Gordon, who created “Step Right Up,” and Rachel Bloom’s Hannah, the year-old writer-director who expressed her beginnings. move again.

“Comedy has evolved since the last time you wrote for television,” Hannah said bitterly. “I mean, honestly, the entire species has evolved.”

Some of those developments pushed the sitcom away from the live, multi-audience style of a studio comedy like “Step Right Up” to more visually complex single-camera formats. The move from network to streaming, a move that discovered “Reboot”, has brought other changes. This new “Step Right Up” no longer needs to follow the 22-minute format with storylines A, B and C and pauses for a break. More sexually explicit material is now allowed, as well as obscene content.

“It’s the world of sitcoms, but it’s streaming,” Reiser said in an interview, talking about the move to streaming in general. “So you can say whatever you want, and you don’t have to laugh.”

But old constraints are hard to die. Although “Step Right Up” has taken on a new look, most episodes of “Reboot” still respect the three-act structure. And if the set-punch, set-break-line type is given, cells A, B, and C remain. “It’s inherent,” Levitan said. “It’s burned in my bones right now and the shows will have a certain sense of structure and plot.”

And yet, as “Reboot” shows up, and as a revisit of most 80s, 90s, and 00s comedies will prove, the plot has changed. Jokes that hit women, gays, disabled people, people of color – rarely get on the air right now. Levitan considers this a limitation, if at all.

“The whole #MeToo, culture of awakening, it changed where you could go, generally in a positive way,” he said. “Where it gets tricky is when people are so afraid of offending someone that you don’t even go anywhere near the line anymore.”

Bloom, who directed the sitcom “Crazy ex-girlfriend,” see this new sensitivity as an opportunity rather than a limitation or a trigger for anger. “There is one thing that is being asked about people now that is not being asked about people before,” she said. “I think that makes us all better people, better comedians.” And she loves playing Hannah, even if she’s not funny sometimes.

“Is a girl in a baggy sweater nervous?” Bloom said. “I know that person.” Reiser, who has described himself as “a little more knowledgeable than Gordon”, agrees with his co-star. “I never understood people who said, ‘You can’t make that joke anymore,’ he said. “I went, ‘Why would you want to? How much do you want to joke? ‘ It’s kind of not cool and insensitive. “

Some of the strongest scenes of “Reboot” are those set in the writers’ rooms that dramatize this tension. The writers Hannah had hired – a peculiar man and two women of color – openly clashed with the older Jewish writers Gordon knew. In one scene, a young writer criticizes a joke made by television veteran Selma (Rose Abdoo, the series’ stealth MVP).

“I think gay people have to have fun,” Selma said again. But they finally found a joke that everyone enjoyed. It involves a stroke of luck. Pratfalls are funny no matter what.

But “Reboot” isn’t just funny. It has a persistent sweetness and a feeling that people can change, often for the better.

“It’s pretty thrilling about the show,” said Keegan-Michael Key, a star of “Step Right Up.” “That’s a mark of Steve Levitan, isn’t it, it’s the feeling of being open-minded?”

“Step Right Up” is the reboot at the heart, but nearly all of the characters are rebooting themselves in one way or another, recovering from divorce, addiction, regional theater. Levitan mentioned how fans told him “Modern Family” helped them through difficult moments in their lives. He hopes that “Reboot,” a show about Hollywood elites with Bentleys and real estate portfolios as well as connections to Nordic royalty, can do the same.

“Bringing a bit of laughter into people’s lives is a really fun thing to do,” he said.

“Reboot” remains agnostic to the question of the merits of restarting itself. Many real-world tools seem a bit more like cheap intellectual property, and some improvements over the original. Some are so bleak that they actually poison their predecessors, going back in time. The creators and stars of “Reboot” have mixed opinions about the form. Or no opinion at all.

“I don’t think I have to say that,” Levitan said. “That’s right, I don’t want to draw the anger of comedy writers.” Reiser survives reboot “Crazy about you” pretty much intact and seems optimistic about form. Bloom was less.

“The most exciting part of the reboot for me was the upcoming reboot headline,” she said. The reboot itself is often a disappointment.

Key sounds more hopeful. He thinks the reboot could work, at least conceptually, and possibly even innovate if the animation idea is convincing enough. “I really think it’s possible,” he said. “It’s all about the angle.”

Until Hollywood figures out those angles, we’ll have to do with something original. Like “Reboot”.



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