Why TV can’t resist rebooting old hits

The appeal of leveraging a new TV show off the back of existing material is, from a commercial perspective, obvious. The industry has never been more cut-throat, with success depending on gaining big viewing figures almost immediately – fail to capture the public imagination early on and you’re dead in the water. So it makes a lot of sense to base your project on intellectual property that will have some automatic name recognition among the great unwashed and, if possible, a built-in fanbase.

The artistic merits of House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are furiously debated, but there’s no doubting there was a sound business case for getting those shows off the ground: audiences of millions who had become attached to Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit films, ready to start salivating at the prospect of new content from their favourite fictional universes.

Eddie Redmayne in The Day of the Jackal, which has been renewed for a second season.Credit: Marcell Piti/Peacock via AP

This is why in the modern day the craze for shows that return to the well, based on previous stories but expanding beyond the source material – whether they be deemed sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes or reimaginings – shows no sign of abating. The Day of the Jackal, an updating of Frederick Forsyth’s novel, has just been renewed for a second season. Historical epic Shogun is in development for a second and a third, as has The Night Manager, the John le Carre adaptation, the first series of which won acclaim way back in 2016.

These are all shows that have gained popular and critical success by reimagining the source material, and with new seasons will now go even further, developing new storylines within their fictional universes. Program makers understandably feel they’re on solid ground with the practice, and the evidence for that keeps mounting. On the big screen as well, sequels flood the market, and the biggest non-sequel currently in cinemas is still a sequel, in a way: Wicked, the adaptation of the Broadway musical, which is itself an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel, which is itself a perspective-shifting spin on The Wizard of Oz.

As far as pre-existing awareness goes, Wicked was always on a winner. It’s been 85 years since Judy Garland pranced down the yellow brick road – and well over a century since L. Frank Baum wrote the Oz books – but just about everyone still knows the story and recognises the basic imagery. It’s a fantastic springboard to jump off if you want a hit. Not all sequel/reboots have that luxury.

Anna Sawai as the translator Mariko in Shogun: the remake was more culturally accurate than the original.Credit: Katie Yu/FX

Shogun won huge plaudits for its recreation of historical Japan, its plot of manipulation and political intrigue, and its characterisations. It was also commended for being a more culturally accurate and considered adaptation than the 1980 miniseries also based on James Clavell’s novel. But that novel, and the miniseries, were hardly household names in 2024: the new adaptation, though having some established ground to work from, had plenty of work to do to let the public know what Shogun is – or was.

In its ensuing series it’ll have even more – the further you get from the source material, the more the writing room has to generate on their own, and the greater the risk of not only alienating fans of the old stuff, but of letting what was so appealing about the world you created in the first place slip away.

This is what happened to Game of Thrones, of course. Though wildly successful – as mentioned, witness the existence of House of the Dragon for proof – its last season drew resounding criticism, and precious few defenders (depending on who you ask, this might apply to the last two or three seasons). Many diagnosed the problem as the fact that, with GoT author George R.R. Martin famously dragging his feet on completing the book series, the makers of the show had to write their own storylines and resolve the various plot threads for themselves. And although they’d shown expert skill in translating Martin’s epic work to the screen, when they had no pre-existing basis on the page, they went off the rails: they didn’t have GoT in their bones, and it showed.

That’s the risk inherent in continuing such a series. The Day of the Jackal has been highly praised for its effectiveness in bringing Forsyth’s story into the present day, incorporating modern issues and technologies into the narrative, and for chameleonic Eddie Redmayne’s outstanding work as the ruthless Jackal. As the new season rolls out, we will be able to see just how much of the first season’s success was down to the foundation built by Forsyth, and how well the screenwriters are able to manoeuvre in the Jackal-verse with the diminishing influence of the author’s guiding hand.

For writers, the appeal of adding to an existing fictional universe is huge. Writers, after all, are fans themselves – of books, movies, TV shows – and the chance to play in a sandbox that inspired them to become a writer in the first place is irresistible.

Moreover, a creative mind, when presented with a scenario, has a tendency to go off on an inventive spree of its own. “What if” is the ultimate question that all writers of fiction ask as a first principle, and applying it to a story someone else has written can be just as exciting as any other area.

Wouldn’t you love to know where the Wicked Witch of the West came from? Aren’t you eager to find out how the Targaryens came to power? What else might the Jackal get up to if we kept following him? And so on and so forth. Fictional worlds are an expansion of our own personal universes, and just as the real world inspires us to think up new stories, so can those worlds that have been imagined by those of us who came before.

But there’s always a risk. For every Night Manager or Day of the Jackal, there’s a Mother and Son or MacGyver: a reimagining that falls flat due to its makers – enthusiastic fans though they might be – failing to either come up with a compelling reason to revisit the world, or to properly understand why the original was so successful in the first place. Any writer looking to continue on the work of another must sit and ask themselves some tough questions, if they want to make their own work a truly memorable addition to a story loved by millions. Commercially, sequels might be the way to go: creatively, they carry more danger than you might think.

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