A Meta Sitcom That Doesn’t Land Well

Ever since the Golden Age of Hollywood, sitcoms have been a staple in American entertainment and around the world. Everything from I Love Lucy to Friends falls under the definition of a sitcom, which history is extensive. While the traditional ones, created back in the fifties and sixties, were filmed in front of live audiences, the notion of what it means to be a sitcom has changed with broader cultural shifts. Television and movies, now more than ever, need to understand what their audiences expect and demand, so the style of comedy shifts with generations. Hulu’s newest release on their platform, Reboot, shows what it takes to bring back a fiction sitcom and adapt it for a new life in the era of streaming platforms.

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The series’ pilot was ordered by Hulu in August 2022, while in January 2022, the series, in its entirety, was officially ordered for streaming. Its premise is that a popular sitcom is brought back with a modern twist, leading to an all-new drama between the cast, former showrunner, and the new one as they try to make this reboot happen. At the same time, comedic elements are rounding out this story. The show seeks to take the tropes of sitcoms and use them to further specific points, such as how Hollywood always uses a bad, but pretty actor, to get the ratings up, or a comedy director at a streaming platform does not know anything about comedy besides the extensive research done on the genre.

There were a few cast replacements before the series began filming, but it now stars Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peele, Schmigadoon!), Johnny Knoxville (Men in Black), Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Judy Greer (The Big Bang Theory, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) Paul Reiser (Aliens), Krista Marie Yu (Dr. Ken), and Calum Worthy (Austin & Ally). The series consists of eight episodes, running at thirty minutes each, and is available on Hulu’s streaming platform. With a cast like this, many of who are experienced in comedy and sitcoms, expectations run high but fall short.

Bringing Back to Life a Popular Sitcom

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Long gone are the days of traditional sitcoms, left behind in their early to mid-2000s glory, but Hulu’s Reboot looks to reclaim these nostalgic bits of memory with contemporary twists. In Reboot, a fictional sitcom titled Step Right Up was the highlight of its audience’s day, all the way back in the 2000s, setting the conventional aspects of the genre in that period. There is the standard family with a mother and her son, along with two men that assume the role of father figures. The show came to a premature end during its original run when one of the actors decided to pursue a film career, despite now, many years later, not having many movie credits to his name.

As recently observed with the revival of other shows like iCarly or the endless biopics on musicians, all good things never truly die as a writer decides that it is time to recreate Step Right Up in all of its former glory with some new twists. And so the show begins at the offices of Hulu, as she pitches it to the streaming platform with the hope of bringing the original cast back together. The show, in true meta fashion, decides to end the direct references to Hulu pretty quickly, but there is a lot of excitement in the air about what the revival could produce. The cast agrees to come back, as it seems that their careers have been down the toilet, or they struggle with their personal lives, leading them to chase the glory of when they were on Step Right Up.

Hannah, the optimistic writer bringing all of this together, will soon discover that the divides that ended the show originally will come back, too, and one has to adapt a sitcom for the streaming era. There is some unsettled drama with the show’s original creator, and he has beef with Hannah, while her vision dictates she wants to usurp the traditional modes of the sitcom. He leans a bit more traditional about what television can and cannot be, so naturally, he clashes with Hannah’s beliefs about what the show’s future holds. There is more than meets the eye with their relationship, which ultimately consists of some meta jokes at the end of the first episode.

There is an underlying element of a workplace comedy threaded throughout this narrative, too. The cast, who falls under specific archetypes, pick right off where they left their relationship: fragmented, smiling over certain memories over the years, with some lingering resentment over what happened in the past. A new body is thrown into the cast to make it seem fresher, which causes problems because she does not know how to act. Reboot hashes through the same arguments between cast members, the original and new showrunner, occasionally adding in a new element to try and keep things fresher than they are. Anyone familiar with the entertainment and acting industries can find themselves nodding along to the issues raised through the jokes, though, as this is very relevant content in today’s world.

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A Comedy that Lacks Humor

At times Reboot comes across as too forced. The humor runs in the vein of running contemporary events and culture, making nods to specific shows, events, and politics to try and make the jokes land better. If the viewer was not familiar with any of these concepts, then it would completely go over their heads, and, unfortunately, there are a lot of moments like this scattered throughout Reboot. With its corny zooms and random cuts to the next scene, shifting the perspective, Reboot tries to make itself seem a lot funnier than it is. However, the characters run in familiar tropes: the actor who makes going to Yale his entire identity, the actress who married rich and became a duchess, the child star who never seems to grow up now writing a self-published tell-all memoir about growing up with ADHD.

Perhaps there is one great irony behind Reboot: its premise claims that this is a reboot of an old, popular sitcom, but it is not an actual reboot. It is a revival. A reboot would mean that the original cast is replaced with completely new actors, and that is not the case here at all. Perhaps the show, like its characters, is in the midst of an identity crisis, as its shifting formats and sense of humor oscillate between moments of seriousness undermined by a comedy. There are some fairly prolific, meta statements being made throughout the show, but the satire aspects get lost in transmission. Is Reboot a workplace comedy? A satire on the entertainment and streaming industry? Or a drama about creating a revival of a popular sitcom? In the end, this show could have used some more characterization.

The characters live and breathe the archetypes they embody, and some of their motives do not make sense—why did Hannah, who created an award-winning short film called “Cunt Saw,” not do that much with this revival? Then there is the child star who still acts like a child. His mother still comes with him to set and nags him about eating sweets and not carrots, he has a crude sense of humor that would match an 11-year-old’s, and he does not act his age at all. There is so much potential in digging deeper into the trauma of being a child star and how it stunts mental development, but the show only uses it as a gag. At the same time, the one actor always boasts about having gone to Yale’s School of Drama, but he still struggles as an actor and needs validation. He is not the only one in such a situation in the art world.

All of this does not mean that Reboot is enjoyable—the thirty minutes episodes make it bite-sized and easy to enjoy in installments. Anything more and the casual viewer might find themselves wanting to quit by the end of episode three. The actors do a wonderful job throughout Reboot, and, considering this cast’s resumes, it is unsurprising that they play these characters as well as they do. How they deliver some of these lines completely in character is impressive, and what might ultimately make someone laugh. Sometimes that is all that keeps a show going, and that is what happens with Reboot.

The first three episodes of Reboot are available to stream on Hulu as of September 20, 2022. The remaining episodes will be released weekly.

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