Représentations dans le monde anglophone – Janvier 2017
TV Remakes, Revivals, Updates, and Continuations: Making Sense
of the Reboot on Television
Mehdi Achouche, Université Lyon 3 Jean Moulin
Keywords: reboot, remake, reimagining, update, TV series
Mots-clés : reboot, remake, réinterprétation, adaptation, série télévisée
When discussing the remake, it is generally the case that we are talking about the
movie remake. Stigmatized or (more rarely) defended, the remake is historically
thought of as a cinematographic institution, with very little thought devoted so far to
the television remake1. Yet the phenomenon has been dramatically increasing over
the past few years. A zap2it.com article counted in late 2013 32 projects being either
remakes or spinoffs, with another 52 series being based on books or comics,
accounting for 20% of the shows in development at the five broadcast networks for
the 2014-15 season. By comparison, 53 such projects were developed throughout
the previous season2. While TV series have been said to be in a new golden age
thanks to their “cinematisation”, they thus allegedly are in danger, according to the
same article, echoing the long-standing complaints about “recycling” on the big
screen, of ironically falling victim to the “movie-fication” of the business: “TV
development is starting to look an awful lot like the movie business, where at the bigstudio level pre-sold franchises and risk aversion seem to be the guiding principles.”
Or, as another writer puts it more succinctly, “there’s a point where the recycled
material is just garbage”3.
1
Only two book-length studies entirely dedicated to the TV remake exist so far, edited by the same scholars:
Lavigne Carlen, Marvotich Heather (eds.), American Remakes of British Television: Transformations and
Mistranslations, Lenham: Lexington Books, 2011; and Lavigne, Carlen (ed.), Remake Television: Reboot Re-use
Recycle. Lenham: Lexington Books, 2014.
2
http://zap2it.com/2013/11/remake-fever-the-movie-fication-of-tv-development-should-worry-fans/, last access on
December 1, 2015.
3http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/john-doyle-reuse-reboot-and-recycle-a-fatal-addiction-in
tv/article22536931/, last access on September 1, 2015.
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Yet, just like its movie counterpart, the notion of a TV remake is a complex and
challenging one, perhaps even more so than in the cinema, and is inevitably tied to
the issue of (and the opprobrium reserved to) sequels and other derivative material.
As the number and the nature of remakes on television has significantly increased
since the early 2000s, the phenomenon has attained new dimensions and nuances.
At the same time, the research that does exist tends to be overwhelmingly directed at
cross-cultural, or transnational, remakes4, rather than to what Thomas Leitch calls
“archival remakes” (Leitch, 38) or what are often called “updates”, older series
remade within the same country. Even less attention has been granted to the reboot,
even though the word and the phenomenon have been seemingly omnipresent for
the past few years.
A major difference between film and TV remakes is historical: whereas remakes
have been present in cinema since almost day one, updates are in fact a relatively
new phenomenon on television, contrary to transnational remakes, with U.S.
remakes of British TV series and sitcoms popular since the 1970s (Lavigne and
Marcovitch, xi). Spin-offs and remediations have also always been present on TV,
with radio shows, movie and movie serials, books or comics adapted for television as
early as the 1950s (Superman, Flash Gordon). Yet archival remakes, in the present
instance Hollywood TV series being remade or “updated” on the same medium5 by
Hollywood itself after a number of years have passed, were rare occurrences until
roughly 15 years ago, with most of those “true” remakes made after 2000. The
closest analog on television would be the remaking of a pilot episode at the
production stage when the network is unhappy with the current script, and/or to
recast one of the lead parts (e.g. the 2009 unaired pilot of Game of Thrones)6.
The traditional difficulty when talking about the remake in cinema is defining the
very notion of remaking, an apparently easy endeavor which quickly reveals itself to
be an intractable task. This is what Constantine Verevis makes clear in his
introduction to Film Remakes (2006) when discussing the taxonomies offered by
4
Such as the recent special issue of the Journal of Media & Cultural Studies dedicated to transnational television
remakes, Perkins Claire, Verevis Constantine (eds.), 29:5, 2015; see also in addition to American Remakes of
British Television: Transformations and Mistranslations, mentioned above, McCabe Janet, Akass Kim, TV's Betty
Goes Global: From Telenovela to International Brand, London: L.B. Tauris, 2013; and the earliest such study,
Moran, Albert, Copycat TV: Globalisation, Program Formats and Cultural Identity, Luton: University of Luton
Press, 1998.
5 We are thus not tackling here the issue of remediations, except as far as they apply to the issue of reboots.
6http://io9.gizmodo.com/5348032/original-pilot-vs-official-pilot-which-shows-changed-the-most,
http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Pilot_episode, last accessed on October 11, 2015. Watching one of those
unaired pilots and the remade one is one of the most fascinating and instructive experiences to understand the
dynamic behind the production of TV series on television.
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previous writers (Verevis, 1-34). The problem is compounded on television with the
use of alternate terms, such as “revivals”, “continuations”, “reimaginings” or more
recently “reboots”, the latter seeming to promise an alternative to, or a variation on,
the remake – a remake of the remake, as it were. Textual, paratextual and legal
factors are all useful factors to help define TV remakes, as Verevis so amply
demonstrates, yet they often contradict each other. In fact, beyond the terminological
confusion encouraged by carefree commentators, the rebooting notion proves useful
to offer valuable insights into the complexity of the remaking enterprise and of
adaptations in general7. Thus, while keeping in mind Verevis’s injunction not to
“succumb to the problems of taxonomism and associated difficulties” (Verevis 2),
distinguishing the various narrative strategies used to remake a scripted TV series
proves valuable in terms of making sense of the specificities of the TV remake
compared to the cinema, and especially its latest avatar, the reboot, which we argue
is more than a terminological bluff.
This article will thus first try to outline the complex relationship between
continuations and the various forms remakes can adopt on television. In each of the
instances studied in the first part, the relationship will be a dyadic, traditional one
between one series and its remake, while the notions of continuations, disguised and
straight remakes will be discussed based on their handling of narrative continuity. Yet
remakes have undergone recent transformations through the implementation of what
are often called “reboots”, whose main interest, beyond their own treatment of
continuity, is to open up the relationship beyond only two referents and reveal the
inscription of many TV remakes in a much larger, franchise-wide, cross-media,
seemingly infinite storytelling enterprise. Finally, the intertextual web will be enlarged
even more by considering the relationship between TV remakes and genres
themselves by taking as a case study the example of the science fiction TV show
remake Battlestar Galactica, itself a reboot.
Remaking a premise
Remakes in the cinema and on television share the same complex relationship to
their source material, making it difficult to precisely define the remake and
differentiate it from other forms of derivative material, traditionally the sequel or more
We follow Hutcheon in considering the word “adaptation” as including every form of transposition of one work
into another, which includes remakes and remediations (Hutcheon, 8).
7
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Mehdi Achouche. Making Sense of the Reboot on Television
recently the prequel. As Thomas Leitch writes, “some [film] sequels […] gravitate
towards remakes, and occasional remakes contain elements of sequels” (as the
latest Star Wars installment has so spectacularly demonstrated8); yet to him they are
still “fundamentally different” as “the audience for sequels wants to find out more, to
spend more time with characters they are interested in and find out what happened
to them after their story was over”, whereas “the audience for remakes does not
expect to find out anything new in this sense: they want the same story again, though
not exactly the same” (44).
Yet “not exactly the same” is a very vague proposition, especially considering that
many sequels do in fact consist in (sometimes minute) variations on the same story,
while some remakes may take significant liberties with their original and even tell a
different story, only keeping the original characters. Given that many (episodic) series
tell different stories on a weekly basis, how could any TV remake ever give
audiences more than a similar premise? Yet Leitch does underline an important
aspect in the appeal of both remakes and sequels, in cinema as well as on television:
characters and what happens to them from one iteration to the next, which is
particularly true in TV series, characterized by “the vital role of the character” in
storytelling, audience participation and identification (Mittell, loc. 2255), but also
copyright acknowledgement. The status of characters in remakes or continuations,
then, because of their importance and because they help clarify the exact narrative
connection between a series and its revival, help define a new iteration on a textual
and legal level as either a continuation, a “disguised” or a “straight” remake9.
To qualify as a remake on a textual level, a new iteration must cancel any form of
narrative continuity with its predecessor. The recent wave of revivals of serialized
shows like Dallas (2012), 24 (2014), Heroes Reborn (2015) The X-files or Twin
Peaks (2017), which pick up years after the original shows ended with the same
actors still playing their (now older) characters, and with ongoing storylines often
picking up as well, are continuations/sequels, because they do tell an ongoing story
and do take into account the time that has passed. They can be seen as adding new
seasons to the old ones rather than starting over with season 1: described as “event
8
http://www.denofgeek.us/movies/star-wars/251490/star-wars-the-force-awakens-can-a-film-be-a-sequel-and-areboot, last access on November 15, 2015.
9 A distinction inspired by those put forward by Michael Druxman (“the disguised remake”, the “direct remake” and
the “non-remake”), Harvey Roy Greenberg (the “acknowledged, close remake”, the “acknowledged, transformed
remake” and the “unacknowledged, disguised remake”) and Thomas Leitch (“readaptations”, “updates”,
“homages”, “true remakes”) for cinema (Druxman’s and Greenberg’s are discussed in Verevis’s introduction, op.
cit.; Leitch offers his own taxonomy in his essay Twice-Told Tales, 45-54). See also Carroll, 36.
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series” or mini-series by marketing material and network executives, the production
code of the episodes for the new 24 and X-Files presented them as respectively
seasons 9 and 10 of the former shows, while marketing material presented their
premieres as “season premieres” rather than “series premieres”10. These shows were
then, in the parlance of tvtropes.com, “un-canceled” and simply brought back under
their old form11.
Many new versions of episodic series will follow the same strategy and will
acknowledge and incorporate the decades that have passed in the real world into the
intradiegetic world of the new show. Television is familiar with the “reunion or
extension episode” (Verevis, 42-43), when characters are reunited several years after
the end of the show for one-shot adventures, often in the form of TV movies (Kojak in
the 1980s, Knight Rider in 1991, Hunter in the 1990s and 2000s, etc.), which can
then sometimes give birth to a new show if successful (thus acting as a backdoor
pilot12). The former actors will then play older versions of their characters, sometimes
with their intradiegetic children if the show wants to carry on as a proper series13.
Sometimes, they will only appear in the pilot episode, like David Hasselhoff, who
appears in the final minutes of the backdoor pilot of the new Knight Rider (2008), time
enough to shake hands with his adult son and convince him to take over for him,
before departing again – thus bringing legitimacy to a show which can then be seen
as joining the canon of the franchise, while (hopefully) boosting ratings.
This is then a continuation. Yet a closer look exposes such a show to be a
remake, or a “disguised remake”, in so far as a TV remake will consist in the
remaking of a premise, with at least part of the cast changing and their adventures
transplanted in a modern setting. Various references and nods will thus tellingly be
made to the original in the course of the remade version, aligning the new production
with the original as closely as possible while still offering fresh weekly scripts. 2008’s
Knight Rider is only “based on characters created by Glen A. Larson” according to
the credits, the legal marker of a looser adaptation than a stricter remake would
10
http://www.hitfix.com/news/jacks-back-fox-confirms-24-live-another-day-for-summer-2014,
http://www.fox.com/the-x-files, http://www.starwatchbyline.com/?p=19594, last access on November 15, 2015.
11 http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnCanceled?from=Main.UnCancelled, last access on December
23, 2015.
12 An episode from a TV show or a made-for-television film which if successful will give birth to its own separate
TV series.
13 Verevis gives the example of Leave it to Beaver, a sitcom originally produced from 1957 to 1963 and then
revived for a special TV movie, Still the Beaver in 1983, which led to a sequel series, Still the Beaver, later
renamed The New Leave it to Beaver (1984-1989). The actors reprised older versions of their original characters,
thus making it a sequel or continuation (Verevis, 45).
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warrant, where the new series would simply be “created by” the original creators
(such as 2011’s Charlie’s Angels, which credits the creators of the former iteration,
who had passed away by then, as the creators of the new one as well). Yet it
provides its viewers with much more than inspiration from the original characters and
with everything they would expect from a series called The Knight Rider: the talking
car, edgy onboard gadgets, the playful banter between Michael and KITT, car
chases, etc., again using an older, white-haired character as a father-like figure and a
romantic interest for Michael (the son being tellingly named after his father).
This is then an update, Leitch defining it as a type of remake (47): remaking a
show to essentially modernize it, like the remixed opening theme of many of these
(barely) disguised remakes (Mission Impossible, Knight Rider, Charlie’s Angels, etc.),
while closely adhering to the original’s narrative formula (the briefing/collecting the
team/setting up the trap/encountering an unforeseen difficulty/the successful conning
of the antagonist in Mission Impossible); exhibiting the same emblematic props
(Michael Knight’s black leather jacket); resorting to similar visual effects (the wipe
transitions from Charlie’s Angels); using the same signature lines (“This tape will selfdestruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim”); recalling the previous iteration in
promotional material (the new “angels” adopting the same postures in promotional
photos); etc. NBC’s marketing material described the new Knight Rider as the old
series “roaring back to life” and “as a reinvented, updated and super-charged action
series”, similar to an ABC press release introducing the new Charlie’s Angels as a
“fun, glamorous, action-packed take on the 1970s smash hit series” 14.
The new Charlie’s Angels shows how relatively unimportant the narrative
continuity issue is: the three titular “angels” are new characters, yet their handler is
still named Bosley, although instead of the affable, benign and father-like figure of the
original show, the new Bosley is a younger, edgier, sexier Latino, who takes a more
active role in the weekly operations and who will in due time fall for one of the girls 15.
Because of the recasting of the original character (who is not introduced as the older
Bosley’s son), we are confronted to a straight remake (there is no narrative
continuity). Yet, since only a change of name, or a reference to some filial
14
http://www.nbc.com/classic-tv/knight-rider, last access on December 1, 2015.
The pilot plays on the expectations of TV viewers in that regard: when one of the angels turns to look for
Bosley, the camera first focuses on a look-alike of the old version of Bosley among the crowd, before revealing
the real one in the background, who is dabbling with two young women in a swimming pool. ‘This is not your
daddy’s Charlie’s Angels”, the series seems to be saying.
15
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relationship, could easily have made the show the “next generation of angels”, the
distinction is again essentially incidental.
Thus disguised remakes will differ very little from the actual, straight remakes,
where the familiar characters have not aged and are thus now played by new actors,
and where they go through the familiar origin story in the pilot – where in short
continuity has been rebooted. Thus a show like The Fugitive (2000) is a straight
remake, as the new version restages the very same origin story: Doctor Richard
Kimble (played by a new actor and who has not aged in the meantime) is again
framed for the murder of his wife in the pilot episode and on the run from the
authorities. Hawaii Five-0 (CBS, 2010 - ) again sees Steve McGarrett meet and
partner with detectives Chin-Ho, Danny and Kono (now a woman) battling crime and
terrorism in Hawaii. Battlestar Galactica (Syfy, 2003-2010), Kojak (USA Network,
2005), Bionic Woman (NBC, 2007) and Ironside (2013, NBC) also fit the same
pattern of having new actors impersonating familiar characters and of retelling in their
pilot
episodes
the
origin
of
their
adventures.
Yet
even
here
copyright
acknowledgement may blur the situation, with Hawaii Five-0’s credits for instance
stating that the remake is “Based on the series ‘Hawaii Five-O’ created by Leonard
Freeman”, thus implying a looser form of adaptation than Charlie’s Angels.
A “real”, fully realized remake would remake every single script of its former
incarnation, which no series has attempted thus far. This was the original intent of the
1988 incarnation of Mission Impossible, because of an ongoing writers’ strike that
prevented new stories to be written; in the end, however, only a handful of early
episodes were actually remade16. Other recent revivals have offered isolated
remakes of some of the most famous and emblematic episodes from their originals:
the 2002 version of The Twilight Zone offered a new version of the now-classic Eye
of the Beholder (1.39). The new Charlie’s Angels (2011) remade one of the most
titillating episodes of the original series, “Angels in Chains” (1.4 in both versions), with
scenes also recreated in the 2000 movie version. More recently, Psych (USA
Network, 2006-2014) even offered its viewers a remake of one of its own earlier
episodes: the 2007 episode entitled "Cloudy with a Chance of ... Murder” (1.12) was
thus remade into the 2014 episode “Cloudy With a Chance of ... Improvement” (8.3).
The change in title indicates the reasoning behind the remake, although the show
16
http://missionimpossible.wikia.com/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%281988%29, based on Patrick J. White, The
Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier, Avon Books, 1991, last access on November 12, 2015.
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Mehdi Achouche. Making Sense of the Reboot on Television
also tried to please fans by playing on the discontinuity to include multiple references,
nods and “Easter eggs” to the series’ past (the show was nearing its end) and its
intradiegetic future (since the episode is still set in its intradiegetic past), while
humorously commenting on the ongoing craze for TV remakes, one of its characters
ironically interjecting at one point: “I hate remakes!”17 It thus showed the point and
pleasure there could in remaking a TV episode, especially for connoisseurs of the
show, although not all viewers appreciated the move18.
As these counter-examples show, fully fledged remakes do not exist on television.
Even transnational remakes of serialized shows will typically only faithfully remake
the pilot episode of their original to then progressively explore fresh narrative
directions, as the U.S. versions of The Office or Broadchurch have shown (as well as
the French version of the latter, Malaterra (France 2, 2015), each revealing a different
murderer by the end of their first season, like the remade episode of Psych. Because
of the ongoing nature of the story being told in these shows, then, these remakes will
not be able to simply propose weekly variations on their premise, a fundamental
difference with episodic shows which will force them to innovate if they want to still
put forward enough novelty and thus get legitimacy.
Whether disguised or straight remakes, then, these various shows all try, like
sequels or prequels, to capitalize on and offer their own variation on and
reinterpretation of a familiar formula, regardless of narrative continuity, minimal to
begin with in an episodic TV show. They function very much like any type of TV
show, underpinned by the same familiarity/novelty dialectic as any form of serial
storytelling, or indeed any form of adaptation (Hutcheon, 4). Indeed, as will be seen
below, TV storytelling traditionally consists, in the case of episodic series, of episodes
offering a new variation on their premise, that is to say, in essence, remaking their
pilot episodes. What official remakes do is simply foreground this principle and push
it to its logical conclusion by broadening the concept to remaking, not just the pilot
(the paradigmatic episode of the series) but the premise and “spirit” of the original
show, that is to say, any element from the hypotext that is seen by the producers as
an emblematic aspect of the previous show. In that regard, they function much like
the continuations of shows like Dallas, which retains so many elements from the
17http://zap2it.com/2014/01/remake-episode-is-psych-all-stars-a-lot-of-things-to-pick-out-for-super-fans/,
last access on November 12, 2015.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3030772/reviews?ref_=tt_ql_7, last access on December 28, 2015.
18
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previous iteration that many will be tempted to call it a remake, narrative continuity
notwithstanding, as witness the numerous press articles calling it a remake.
As Hutcheon writes of adaptations in general, “we seem to desire the repetition as
much as the change” (9), which applies equally to television storytelling. Remaking is
thus a natural fit in the context of TV storytelling, providing an alternative strategy for
the repetition/innovation dialectic to be realized once more, as it itself needs
variations: endlessly offering audiences sequels or spin-offs will wear thin, hence the
need to draw inspiration from movie practices and offer prequels or remakes/updates
instead. This is all the more logical, from a commercial standpoint, as TV series are
increasingly being co-opted in cross-media franchises, or brands, which increasingly
blur the (narrative, economic) lines between cinema, television and other media. This
is why another, more complex kind of remake has seen the light of day: the reboot,
whose handling of narrative continuity is far more consequential and which does
concentrate on – reinvented – characters.
Remakes vs. Reboots
Some remakes do not indeed merely remake an actual show but a whole cross- or
transmedia franchise, or selected parts of them, and thus recreate discrete elements
of various hypotexts at the same time – not just a former TV show or even a common
original property. Reboots are the clearest manifestation of the current efforts by
studios and networks to build and capitalize on franchises and brands as they try to
rebrand their current properties and relaunch and reinvent them to realize their full
commercial potential. They do so by getting rid of narrative continuity altogether but
also by retaining and “reinventing” their characters.
The notion of rebooting an ongoing series stems from comic books, when D.C.
Comics rebooted the storylines of its major characters in the 1980s. The 12-volume
limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986) rebooted the D.C. universe (or
“multiverse”) by destroying the “space/time continuum” and timeline of the original
and bringing the countless storylines of D.C’s various superheroes back to square
one. This allowed the company to start anew, simply abolishing the multiple
contradictions and complexities which had accumulated over the decades and
confused readers and writers alike (Proctor, Anatomy, 6). The conceit, which indeed
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Mehdi Achouche. Making Sense of the Reboot on Television
had already been partially used in the past in the cinema 19, was later embraced by
Hollywood when a D.C. adaptation, Batman Begins (2005), conveniently erased all
previous films and retold Batman’s origin story. The move was soon aped by
Superman (whose 2013 iteration, Man of Steel – a nod to the 1980s reboot of the
character – “cancelled” the 2006 version); Spiderman (which in 2012 abolished the
continuity established by the previous trilogy, a mere five years after the last opus);
or, most spectacularly, 2009’s Star Trek, which, thanks to a time travel conceit,
wreaked havoc in the byzantine Star Trek continuity by establishing a parallel reality
where the canon was abolished and everything could be remade differently (Proctor,
Déjà-View).
Hollywood had thus given itself a new form of remake, which would redo not
simply one film but an entire film series and cancel their narrative continuity. Most
importantly, the new movie series would not in fact remake the various films but
would completely reimagine the whole intradiegetic universe, offering new storylines.
Going back to square one thus allowed them, like D.C. 20 years earlier, to send their
characters in new narrative directions and reinvent, or “reimagine” in the current
parlance20, their biographies, character developments and interactions, etc. This
means that a reboot (a continuity reboot) will also typically be a reimagining: the
franchise is reset and reinvented according to new parameters. Finally, these reboots
will typically reach farther back in time than the previous film series to draw their
inspiration from older hypotexts, thus allowing them to rejuvenate their respective
franchises by going back to the source or some later milestone: the rebooted comics
of the 1980s (Batman, Superman), the original TV series of the 1960s (Star Trek), or
the original Ian Fleming novel in the case of James Bond (Casino Royale).
The same issue as in films thus arises, with the palimpsestic relationship between
numerous hypo- and hypertexts blurring the straight, linear relationship between a
film or TV show not adapted from any previous material and its remake, a dyadic
pattern which in an age of franchises and cross- or transmedia storytelling is
increasingly becoming obsolete. Even the triangular relationship Thomas Leitch
examines between the remake, the original film and the common literary property
19
Highlander III (1994) for example simply acted as though the second film (1991) had never happened, and
conveniently forgot some of the plot elements established in the first one. We should then talk about a partial
(continuity) reboot. James Bond is different, as the absence of almost any continuity among the films means the
movie series simply carried on with different actors.
20 Tim Burton popularized the use of the term when he characterized his version of Planet of the Apes (2001) as a
reimagining, to convey the liberties his version was taking compared to the 1968 version.
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both are based on is increasingly being superseded by a comic-book-inspired “hyperdiegesis” (the accretion of narratives all related to the same storyworld; Hills, 137),
where the hypotexts are far more numerous: the original comic book and its
numerous reincarnations throughout the decades (new authors, new versions, new
reboots), the various TV series, cartoons and movies produced over the years, the
novels and novelizations, etc. It would thus be difficult to deem the new Flash (CW,
2014 - ) a remake of the previous TV series of the same name (NBC, 1990-1991),
but rather the latest take on the character and his universe. It would even be difficult
to call it a new adaptation of a common literary property since the series can draw its
inspiration from any of the hypotexts produced since the first comic book was
published in 1940 (for instance, the character reprised in both TV shows, Barry Allen,
was not created until 1956 in the first revival of the Flash comic book series21).
Linearity is thus abolished in the sense that discrete elements from the hypernarrative, originating in various media and eras, can be brought together in the
reboot.
What ultimately links the original texts and their reboots, then, are again the
characters. The same main protagonists (and often their most popular antagonists)
are present in all these iterations, but played by different actors, which again marks
the reboot as belonging to the realm of the remake. The same phenomenon has
been recently occurring on television, in the wake again of the contemporary
popularity of superheroes and comic book adaptations. And again, D.C Comics is at
the center of the wave of rebootings.
None of the recent or current TV shows based on comic books which had already
inspired previous TV shows, virtually all of them from D.C. (The Flash, Gotham,
Supergirl), can be called remakes of those previous shows. Gotham (FOX, 2014 - ),
which recounts the adventures of a young Jim Gordon in Gotham City and tells the
genesis of the various characters populating the Batman universe (Batman himself,
then only a child; the future Penguin, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, etc.), has no previous
TV counterpart and is technically a prequel. The show shares the same universe as
Batman, yet is decidedly not a Batman TV series in the sense that it does not feature
Batman as its main protagonist. The same can be said of Smallville (WB, 20012011), the first TV prequel to recount the youthful adventures of Clark Kent, before he
became Superman, thus revising the Superman canon (e.g. a younger Lex Luthor
21
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Flash, last access on December 23, 2015.
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Mehdi Achouche. Making Sense of the Reboot on Television
now resides in Smallville). Supergirl (ABC, 2015 - ) is a variation on Superman’s
premise (a Krypton refugee adopted by a human family who must grapple with their
superpowers and become a superhero) with a woman in lieu of Clark Kent/
Superman. The Superman mythos is thus again remade and reimagined, with the
show going one step farther than Smallville (it is not just a teenage version of Clark
Kent we will follow, but his female cousin), but no specific previous TV show is the
object of the remake (nor is any specific film being adapted to the small screen). Yet
of each of these shows will be replete with allusions to the remixed canon, providing
viewers with the familiar oscillation between novelty and familiarity, functioning mostly
on extrapolation (what was Clark Kent’s youth like in Smallville? What would a female
Superman be like? Etc.).
Supergirl brims with allusions to the previous TV shows, relying on familiar forms
of “celebrity intertextuality” (Verevis, 20) used by remakes: Dean Cain, who played
Clark Kent/Superman in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (ABC,
1993-1997), is now her adoptive father. Many story elements echo those of the
previous Superman series: Supergirl arrived as a child and was raised by adoptive
parents; she now works as a journalist in a Daily Planet-like newspaper, where she is
an inconsequential nobody who uses glasses and clumsiness to magically conceal
her secret identity; her intimidating boss, Cat Grant, is the equivalent of Perry White
(but is now a woman); she dons a similar blue and red uniform with the same ‘S’
plastered on its front; she has exactly the same powers as Superman; etc. Even a
character from the Superman universe, Jimmy Olsen, is part of the cast, thus
possibly establishing some form of shared universe with the ongoing movie series (if
the actor is glimpsed in the future Man of Steel movies reprising his role) or, possibly,
with at least some of the other D.C series now in production (Arrow, The Flash, soon
Legends of Tomorrow). The show is thus clearly a variation on, if not a remake of, the
classic Superman storyline, in spite of its allusions to Supergirl’s cousin somewhere
in a hypothetic shared universe (“he”, “the other guy”, etc.).
Crucially, what Supergirl also does is remake discrete narrative elements from
previous hypotexts: peripheral characters, plot elements, emblematic scenes. The
first scene in the pilot is thus the occasion to see yet another rendering of Kal-El’s
(Superman) hasty departure from a dying Krypton, a key scene in the Superman
mythology already staged dozens of times in the previous filmed incarnations of the
franchise, including on television (Lois & Clark, Smallville) and cinema. In her first
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outing as a superhero, Supergirl saves a passenger plane from crashing, an
emblematic sequence in most previous Superman incarnations (as Supergirl actually
notices herself in one of many verbal allusions to Superman). Actor Mehcad Brooks
offers yet another remaking of Jimmy Olsen (this time a black man), while Supergirl
herself had already been portrayed on television at least once, in a few episodes of
Smallville (as well as on the big screen). Even Cat Grant, originally a Superman
character, can be compared with her previous incarnations, including on TV (Lois &
Clark, Smallville). The same can be said of Gotham and The Flash, with archetypal
scenes of their own: the killing of Bruce Wayne’s parents (which fans by now know by
heart and will pay extra attention to, comparing the scenes online22), or Barry Allen
being struck by lightning in his laboratory.
Many autonomous elements (scenes, costumes, lines) can thus be remade within
a particular show, establishing a giant and complex network of references, allusions
and quotations among dozens of productions, which only the most expert of fans will
comprehend fully. All these discrete remakings are made possible by the presence of
the same characters, or of characters who clearly echo and mirror their
predecessors, even when they are not technically the same ones (Cat Grant harkens
back to her previous incarnations as well as Perry White’s). Such shows are “based
on the characters from DC Comics”, as the credits usually indicate, and each of these
shows thus reboots the whole or part of their own universes, since they remake, or
reimagine, the genesis of some of their key characters, the way they originally meet,
how and why they become who we know they are fated to become (Smallville,
Gotham), etc., thus inevitably contradicting and remaking the canon established by
previous incarnations. While not being remakes in the usual sense, therefore, and
often technically being prequels, these shows have everything to do with the
remaking enterprise.
Finally, a reboot can be understood outside of its comic-book, multiverse origins.
Like in cinema, partial reboots had already been employed in the past to opportunely
erase some inconvenient story lines. The great paradigmatic example on television is
the Dallas season 9 finale cliffhanger, where viewers dramatically learn that Bobby
was not dead after all and that the whole of season 9 was only a dream – the show
was then only rebooted back one season, to accommodate the return of star Patrick
22
https://hitfilm.com/forum/discussion/5626/bruce-wayne-s-parents-always-die, last access on November 27,
2015.
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Duffy and producer Leonard Katzman – the show was thus “retconned” (for
retroactive continuity, yet another term imported from comics)23. The rebooted 2012
version also took over where the original series had ended, ignoring the two reunion
television movies that had been produced in the meantime24. But the term can also
be used by the media to designate any kind of significant shakeup in an ongoing
show. The midseason cast and concept shakeup of the rebooted Knight Rider, for
example, with several actors dismissed and the concept of the show tweaked to more
closely resemble the original series (chance encounters with strangers in need rather
than government-sponsored operations), was thus itself sometimes called a reboot of
the rebooted show25.
While the media’s haphazard use of terminology is partly responsible for the
terminological confusion, the Knight Rider example also demonstrates how the
reboot label is understood as designating some kind of major change in the set-up of
a show, which can sometimes reinvent and remake itself in the course of its run. In
the case of the remake per se, it often tends to designate a remade series with a
decidedly different tone and style, a show so markedly different from the previous
one that the word remake is felt to be insufficient to convey the sheer importance of
the changes, hence the need for a stronger term. The subjective nature of deeming a
new iteration a reboot often makes the term a difficult one to apply: how far should
the remake stray from its original material to deserve the label? Films like Batman
Begins, Star Trek or even 2006’s James Bond adventure Casino Royale were also
called reboots or reimaginings because they relied on such radically altered visual
aesthetics, tone and characterization to their material that they seemed to reinvent
their respective “brands”. What did not change, crucially if they were to be considered
remakes, were the characters’ names, but the way these protagonists now behaved
and interacted was significantly modified. On television, the most striking example of
such a radical makeover is Battlestar Galactica, which radically revised the older
series (1978-1979), giving it, to use the words most often used to characterize those
reboots/reimaginings, a “darker, grittier” tone and outlook – dealing with religious
fundamentalism and terrorism, suicide bombings, torture, and other issues related to
23http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-leonard-katzman-1362803.html,
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Retcon, last access on November 27, 2015.
24 http://ultimatedallas.com/cynthiacidre/, last access on November 27, 2015.
25 http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/11/11/knight-rider-cast-gets-smaller, last access on November 27, 2015.
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the Bush administration’s War on Terror, in stark contrast with the original26. Yet, it is
not so much the original Galactica that showrunner Ronald D. Moore strived to
reimagine than, more ambitiously, the space opera subgenre itself.
Remakes and genre
Many television remakes’ point of reference is not just the series they are based
on, but the whole genre to which they belong. This means that remakes which
purposefully remake a designated hypotext may actually have more to do with
another series, or with several other shows. In that case, the “palimpsestuous”
relationship which underpins the remake will be even more complex than simply the
hypotexts which bear the same name or belong to the same cross-media universe
(Hutcheon, 6).
Many series traditionally lift elements from each other to the point that they can
reasonably be seen as unofficial or “disguised remakes” in so far as they remake a
previous premise – much like the straight remakes studied above. Such is the case of
the many series which have used The Fugitive as a template without using the exact
same plot or characters (Renegade, Two, First Wave, probably many others), before
the actual remake was produced in 2000. In each of these shows, a man wrongfully
accused of murdering his wife is on the run from the authorities, while trying to clear
his name. In the meantime, he travels across the United States, encountering
strangers along the way who he helps getting out of whatever dire situation they find
themselves in. Other series, such as The Pretender (NBC, 1996-200) or The
Incredible Hulk (CBS, 1978-1982) use similar premises, with the exceptions of the
wrongfully-accused trope. First Wave is even trickier as it actually combines The
Fugitive and The Invaders, with the hero framed for the murder of his wife by aliens
who he tries to expose on a weekly basis.
Things complicate even further when considering that First Wave, like many other
1990s science fiction or fantasy shows (such as an aborted Invaders remake) was
produced in the wake of The X-files’ success, by one of that show’s writers, Chris
Brancato. What these examples show is that a TV series does not need to be an
official remake to draw a large part of its inspiration from one or several previous
shows and remake their premise with the appropriate variations – another kind of
26
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkerAndEdgier, http://www.thebatt.com/opinion/a-darker-grittiermarvel/article_21f5aeb2-9718-11e5-b616-5baca2a861a6.html,
http://tvline.com/2015/09/23/heroes-rebornzachary-levi-season-1-spoilers-preview/, last access on December 1, 2015.
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Mehdi Achouche. Making Sense of the Reboot on Television
disguised or unacknowledged remake. But since remakes, as we have seen, always
offer their own variation on the remade formula to get more legitimacy and raison
d’être, the line between the official and officious remake can be very fine indeed. As
Steven Gil writes, “remaking [is] a cultural practice that operates at multiple levels.
Textual aspects of narrative and premise can be remade, thus showing the
intertextuality of television series that is present even in those examples which are
labeled as original” (33).
What The Fugitive did was invent a pattern that would prove ideal for a weekly
episodic series, with each new episode taking place in a new town and centering on
a new stranger-in-need. Along with the cop or private detective investigating a new
case each week, the spaceship crew visiting a new planet in each episode, the
lawyers defending a new case, the doctors treating new patients, etc., the pattern
has been able to the present day, with the appropriate variations, to sustain a whole
TV genre in itself. Each new show locating itself in one of these genres, or at the
crossroads between several of these, thus consists in the remaking of one or several
previous series whose tropes have been adopted and assimilated by said genre. In
that sense, then, again, all television is remaking.
This will prove even truer of series which rely on such a formulaic premise that
each new episode is actually a variation on the same. In essence, each new episode
is then a remake of the pilot. Columbo’s (already in essence a disguised TV
adaptation of Hitchcock’s 1955 Dial M for Murder) extremely repetitive nature might
be the extreme example of this, the only obstacle to calling each and every episode a
remake of the pilot being the names of that week’s characters and the nature of the
murder, while no other weekly variation will be fundamentally different from the
creative liberties a remake might grant itself. The more formulaic a show is, therefore,
the more it will weekly remake itself and its pilot episode. A show like 24 upped the
ante by basically remaking, or reinventing, its original season every year. The current
wave of spin-offs also demonstrates this, with each CSI or NCIS avatar essentially
remaking the original, highly-codified series, with a new cast and a new setting (a
new city). This is what Ina Rae Hark underlines: “all television series are just that,
serial narratives expected optimally to provide sequels every week for one season
and several seasons after that” (122), except that it is in fact weekly remakes that
many shows offer rather than sequels (if, as seen above, the distinction has any
relevance at all). Because television series are first commercial endeavors produced
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Représentations dans le monde anglophone – Janvier 2017
on an industrial scale, industrialization does indeed require, to sustain huge outputs,
endless repetition, standardization and serialization (Kelleter 22).
The remade Battlestar Galactica is a good example in the way that it remakes not
just one hypotext but a whole network of them. Galactica can and should thus also
be read as a “disguised remake” of Star Trek: Voyager, the show which Ron Moore,
Galactica’s showrunner, used to work for. Frustrated essentially by the episodic
nature of that show, and by the constraints of the Star Trek doxa (not too dark, clean,
straight, optimistic, formulaic, statically filmed) he used Galactica, which essentially
has the same storyline as Voyager (a ship lost in space looking for the way to earth),
as a vehicle to implement the ideas he had developed while working on Voyager. For
example, the ship should bear the traces of the passing of time, food and fuel should
be issues for the crew, there should be a psychological impact stemming from the
situation, etc. Hence the idea that he tried to make a more “realistic” kind of space
opera, essentially an oxymoron up until then27.
This also allowed him to revisit the Star Trek paradigm as a whole, and even the
space opera subgenre itself (which on television is essentially the same thing), giving
it more “realism” (docu-fiction-like aesthetics, characters with believable and relatable
flaws and psychology) and seriousness28. The show even tried to transpose material
from contemporary series belonging to other genres (mainly 24 and The West Wing),
again demonstrating the vast corpus a remake can draw on (while the original
Galactica drew itself much of its inspiration from Star Wars, released one year
before). The show also relies on science fiction at large, basing its story on the
classical Frankenstein and man vs. machine theme, which have little to do with space
operas, and draws its inspiration from cinema as well, mainly Blade Runner (use of
the word “skinjobs”, the ambiguity as to the nature of these so-called robots, the
presence of actor Edward James Olmos). Thus Battlestar is essentially a reimagining
and a remake of at least two shows (the original Galactica and Star Trek: Voyager),
while incorporating elements from other series, books and films.
Does this mean that the original Battlestar was only an alibi? Yes and no, as the
new show does take pains to acknowledge its predecessor, including by featuring
some former cast members. The original Appolo, Richard Hatch, plays an entirely
27
http://trekmovie.com/2008/06/21/exclusive-interview-ron-moore-fighting-the-trek-cliches/, last access on
December 1, 2015.
28 Ron Moore expands on his vision for Galactica in the series’ bible:
http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Battlestar_Galactica/Battlestar_Galactica_Series_Bible.pdf, last access on
December 1, 2015.
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new character, Tom Zarek, one that did not exist in the previous iteration, and uses
him as a mirror to the new Appolo in one of the early episodes (“Bastille Day”, 1.3).
The pilot will also allow viewers to hear the original theme music playing
intradiegetically. The show even tries to situate itself in the narrative wake of the
previous one, by starting forty years after a previous war against their enemy robots
and presenting the old models as being very close to what the robots in the previous
show looked like. Yet this is definitely not a continuation of the old show since
civilization is once more destroyed in the pilot and the same characters have once
more to flee towards a mythical earth. The “reimagined” Galactica thus keeps
emphasizing in its intradiegetic narrative the idea of cyclical, mythical repetition, with
everything that has happened doomed to happen again. The goal of the characters is
to break free of the meaningless repetition of history, with the show ending on a
question mark: will humanity be able to break free? The original conceit of starting
the series decades after a previous war thus foregrounds the remade nature of the
new show, promising metadiegetically to break free from the mold of the previous
series.
The original Galactica is therefore only one coordinate (admittedly an important
one) in the constellation of previous shows and films the new show is amalgamating.
The remake is not alone in doing so; every TV series does the same, to varying
degrees, especially when they belong to such codified genres as science fiction or
subgenres such as the space opera, (sub)genres being giant networks of diachronic
and synchronic connections between texts which also function through the same
repetitive process as TV series – each new text is a variation on a given genre
(Altman, 25). Many shows have likewise traditionally recycled storylines from films
belonging to similar genres to base some of their episodes on: seemingly countless
science-fiction/fantasy shows have thus used the never-ending day conceit at the
center of Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) for at least one of their episodes29.
Remakes or reinterpretations thus systematically transcend the strict limit often
imposed on them to adapt material from many texts, media or genres. Remakes
simply make some intertextual connections more obvious and clarify the legal status
of a production, but they also obfuscate other connections by pointing ostentatiously
to one show in particular, at the expense of the others present in the palimpsestic
29
Lois and Clark, The X-files, Xena: Warrior Princess, Early Edition, First Wave, Stargate SG-1, Buffy, Angel,
Charmed, Farscape, Fringe...
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identity of each and every show. Logically, even remakes should thus be able to
bring their own contributions to the ever-evolving genres to which they belong and
serve as inspiration for future series, as Stargate Universe (Syfy, 2009-2011) has
arguably done by drawing some of its inspiration from Galactica, despite its official
status as a spinoff of the Stargate franchise. By reimagining several shows and a
whole subgenre, then, Galactica provided the sort of novelty that only a reboot or
reimagining may be capable of, as opposed to a more traditional remake.
The repetition/innovation dialectic which lies at the heart of the remaking
enterprise thus underpins TV series themselves, making the idea of TV remakes
logical and inevitable. Yet the commercial nature of the phenomenon makes it look
deeply suspicious, while obscuring the similar nature of much television fare. The
advent of cross- or transmedia brands also means that remakes have attained a new
degree of complexity, where finer elements (characters, scenes, various emblematic
elements of their respective brands) can be sampled and remixed rather than simply
remade, to use another useful analogy developed by Eduardo Navas 30. Reimagined,
reinterpreted or remixed, these elements offer infinite new potential to producers,
writers and showrunners. Reboots or reimaginings thus destabilize the traditional
understanding of a finite, quantifiable text, coming closer to reveal the true nature of
texts as a “space in many dimensions”, a “tissue of citations, resulting from the
thousand sources of culture”: “the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior,
never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose
some by others […]”, as Roland Barthes wrote31. This is not to deny the validity of
judging remakes or reboots from the perspective of the novelty or relevance their
reinterpretation brings to the “original” material; but by more clearly escaping the
traditional dyadic relationship they have long been ascribed, the modern forms of
remakes, with their reliance on seriality, reinterpretation, reinvention and sampling,
foreground the mechanics of contemporary storytelling and offer, ironically enough,
fresh ways forward for television to reinvent itself.
30
31
http://remixtheory.net/, last access on December 14, 2015. See also bibliography.
http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf, last access on December 15, 2015.
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Mehdi Achouche. Making Sense of the Reboot on Television
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