Revivals and reboots, defined: Revivals tend to be conservative (and white), while reboots are more open to transformation

The New York Times

The trend of bringing back old TV shows falls into two categories: reboots and revivals. According to James Poniewozik, revivals are "series, exhumed as if from the grave, with the same characters played by the same actors, picking up years or decades later." Reboots, meanwhile, are "old titles being remade for another era, with new casts, and possibly new settings and characters." Poniewozik says revivals tend to be "conservative by nature — artistically, if not necessarily politically. By definition, they’re trying to re-create the past in the present, simulating the appeal of the original even as they show how the world has changed around the characters. For the typical revival, the best-case scenario is getting the viewer to say, 'This feels like the same show I used to watch back then.'" Revivals, he says, tend to deny change, at least creatively. He also notes that "revivals, which reproduce TV’s past down to the original casting, have tended to be very white, as TV’s history is." Reboots, on the other hand "may be successful or disastrous, but it at least offers the possibility, and the requirement, for rethinking and transformation. Battlestar Galactica, after 9/11, turned a breezy 1970s space opera into an ambitious story about politics, religion and the ethics of survival in the face of an existential threat. More recently, when Netflix imagined One Day at a Time with a Cuban-American family, it was able to speak to modern questions about immigration and representation, about who defines America and the working class." Reboots like Charmed can recalibrate the original's premise to take on modern stories, like the #MeToo movement.