If old TV stars can make a comeback, why can’t an old TV show make a comeback, too?
TV is gripped in a fever of remakes — the legal drama “The Defenders,” the cop show “Hawaii Five-O” and, most recently, “La Femme Nikita,” now retitled simply “Nikita.”
All are on the schedule for next fall.
In recent years, “Melrose Place,” “Bionic Woman” and “Knight Rider” crashed and burned without a soul — except the suddenly out-of-work actors — to mourn them.
So why the rush to remake shows when — if history is any guide — the odds against them are so long?
The answer may be that TV is now old enough that stealing from its own past is still a relatively new idea.
“The remake model is still early on in its process,” says Thom Sherman, the CW’s executive vice president of drama development.
“Maybe we’ll run out of titles that we’re willing to try,” he says, but not yet.
On one hand, a remake has a better chance of getting attention, says Sherman.
“You’re trying to find any means to get yourself noticed, to get the press talking about it and get publicity for the show.”
Another reason that remakes seem to be suddenly in vogue is because it seems to be what producers are pitching.
Mark Stern, executive vice president of development at Syfy, where a remake of “Alien Nation” is in the works, estimates that 25 percent of the new show ideas that comes across his desk these days are remakes of old shows.
“People like me, who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, are now programmers,” he says. “So we grew up with [shows like] ‘Hawaii Five-O.’ Shows that were staples of our childhoods are now [ready] for us to remake.”
The remake programmers like to point to — the one with the some patina of success — is “Battlestar Galactica.” But even at its most popular, “BS” hovered at around 2 million viewers a week — sufficient for a cable channel like Syfy but not for big-time network TV.
More often than not, networks don’t even wait for an outsider to pitch them a remake. They rummage on their own through the vaults of their studio owners — CBS has Paramount, ABC has Disney and NBC has Universal — for the low-cost rights to shows they already own.
People may be quick to accuse networks of taking the easy way out — recycling old stuff instead of taking chances on something new. But the opposite is actually true, say program execs.
“The challenge is greater when you reboot a show,” says David Stapf, president of CBS Television Studios. “It better be pretty good, because you are putting it up against something that was great.
“What you don’t want is: ‘It’s good, but it’s not as good as the original.’ ”
“People’s preconceived notion is not to like it just because it’s a remake,” says Sherman. ” ‘We’ve seen it already, we loved the first one. How are we ever going to love the second one?’
“We have to fight that a lot.”
The push for remakes is, in fact, all over Hollywood. Familiarity is the reason we have seen so many versions of “Batman” and “Sex and the City” in the movies.
Stapf, whose flashy “Hawaii Five-O” remake is perhaps the biggest gamble of the new season, relishes the fight.
Unlike his previous series “90210” and “Melrose,” which he admits relied too much on nostalgia, he’s treating “Hawaii Five-O” as if “we’re doing a show that no one’s ever heard of . . . our mantra going into this is that it’s a show that can completely stand alone.”