Last week, the news broke that the long-rumored Scrubs revival was in active development at ABC, and almost immediately series creator Bill Lawrence came out to assuage the protests from the fans. It’s something of a common practice these days, in this cycle of reboots in which we appear to live. For as long as I can remember, folks would say things like “There are no original ideas”, but I feel that’s never been more true than today. I mean, Warner Bros Discovery is staking its future on a Harry Potter streaming series, when the film series ended just 13 years ago. And that’s honestly them showing a bit of restraint, as there were only 9 years between the original run of Gossip Girl and the HBO Max revival of the franchise.
But it’s not just recent properties on the table, as studios are reaching WAY back to resuscitate some projects. There were THIRTY-SIX YEARS between Top Gun and its sequel Top Gun: Maverick, with Tom Cruise looking a mere 5 years older, thanks to the unicorn blood he’s made a regular part of his daily nutrition regimen. Due to its success, there are now talks for Cruise to return to the world of 1990 racing drama Days of Thunder. The more this happens, though, the less I truly believe there’s a reliable audience out there for these projects. Hollywood is an industry where they routinely mistake the exception for the norm, and they tend to always learn the wrong lessons from things. While Marvel Studios has experienced a lot of success with its worldbuilding, it sparked this trend where everyone felt they needed to have a shared universe. They were announcing these things ahead of time, instead of letting them develop organically. That’s why we’re able to laugh at that Universal Monsters Dark Universe that never got off the ground. Those fools had a photo shoot and everything!
Worldbuilding, however, is similarly to how actual civilizations develop: in the beginning, there’s room for the sharing of ideas and a lot of different ingredients and components. Over time, however, the “identity” of the world begins to take shape. It’s at that point that those within have to decide what does and doesn’t fit into what they’ve built. It was all fine and dandy when Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was a hungry developer, but now he’s something of a God king. And it’s at this point that things become somewhat homogenized. Fewer risks are taken, and the creativity gives way to corporate interests and demands. Suddenly you’ve got Ms. Marvel comics being written by the actress who plays the character, who’s had no writing experience whatsoever, but her name is “familiar” to the audience. Whereas the “It’s connected” aspect of the MCU was originally attractive, over time things have gotten muddied and jumbled. It’s a quagmire of origin stories and contract renegotiations, parallel to comic reboots to make the books align more with the live action fare. Now, the mere 16 years of continuity serve as a deterrent to any latecomers to the party. And if Marvel is this bad, one can only imagine how folks feel about Doctor Who (61 years), Star Trek (58 years), and Star Wars (47 years). Which leads me to wonder: Are our “mega franchises” actually attracting new fans, or just milking the existing ones for all they’re worth?
I know everyone has a knee-jerk answer for this question, but I really need you to take a moment to think about this. The Elder Millennial is a weird beast, in that we existed both before and after the internet. Also, we have this insane inability to let things go. There are social media accounts that thrive merely by posting a picture of an Atari, with a caption like “If you know what this is, then you had an amazing childhood.” Hate to break it to some of y’all, but the 80s? Not that awesome. There was AIDS, and New Coke, and Reagan. The beauty of all that bullshit we worship was it distracted us from the grown-ups’ fear of the Russians invading or, even worse, nuclear war. For every 5 Max Headrooms, there was a Chernobyl. That’s the ebb and flow of pop culture. Our parents grew out of their obsession with the Pet Rock or Mr. Potato Head (the one where you just stuck plastic parts into a real potato), and they “put away childish things”. Now, however, we forgive these sins by creating terms like “manchild” and “adult collector”. Now, I’m not necessarily saying these things are wrong. I would even identify with some of them. But we can’t ignore how we got to this place. The problem, though, is we never moved on. We just have more money and more mental health issues. That’s the only way to explain why you can go into Walmart, right now, and buy a $40 Biker Mice from Mars action figure. That shit wasn’t even popular in 1993 (Yes, there were 65 episodes that aired over the course of 3 years, but I’d argue that’s not a “success” given that the first season of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers was 59 episodes. So, Biker Mice aired one season’s order of episodes over three years. Deceptive!). But these toys exist because the company, Nacelle, felt like there was a customer base for them, based on trends they’ve observed.
The mere fact that we’ve gotten down to the “Biker Mice Tier” shows just how far we’ve fallen. We will grasp at anything that reminds us of our childhood, and will accept no attempts to modernize it or “smooth out some of its edges”. The only exception of this seems to be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but you’d still have rioting in the streets if they lost their multicolored bandanas, a la the source material that most TMNT fans have never read. A lot of these decision makers are elder millennials, so they do the whole “I want to make a product that I would have wanted to see as a kid” thing. Our inability to let this stuff go, however, has made it inaccessible – and unattractive – to younger audiences. No one wants to like what their parents liked, plus a lot of this shit just wasn’t “cool” to begin with. So, we drove younger folks away from conventional media, with our Prequel trilogies and our Fuller Houses. It didn’t happen all at once, but it happened over time. That’s why one of the most powerful tastemakers for kids in the last decade is a teenage, seemingly Filipino kid currently going through an “awkward phase”. Hollywood didn’t originally care about Ryan Kaji because they didn’t know how to insert him into their system, but they couldn’t deny he had impact. The kids will be alright, because they found their own things.
Meanwhile, there are grown men, with prostate exams scheduled, still waiting on this Masters of the Universe movie. It ain’t happening, baby. Let it go. And let’s take it one step further: Even if it were to happen, you’d hate it because Hollywood wouldn’t have access to any of your precious ideas for what makes the “perfect” He-Man film. Let’s let some stuff rest. The only things keeping MOTU around are these 40 year old men, so God bless ’em! And God bless Mattel for catering to them! But there are no new, organic fans of Masters of the Universe. There aren’t. No modern-day child came to that fandom on their own. I don’t care how many animated series Netflix wants to make, the only kids watching that stuff were forced into it by overeager fathers. Show me a fatherless child who likes He-Man, and I’ll show you a kid with a really involved Elder Millennial Big Brother, Teacher, or Afterschool Program worker. Adults who get kids hooked on MOTU are almost like the adults getting kids into Zeppelin. “You only think The Monkees are cool, but lemme hip you to some real music.” My peers hate when I say this, but your kid doesn’t care about some dude running around in furry panties with a sword. Your kid wants to play Fortnite, where they might create that same character, but ironically.
It wasn’t always like this, though. I look back at my own life, and how I found my way to Star Trek. I didn’t have a figure in my life who introduced it to me. The furthest thing from it, really. It just happened to be when Star Trek: The Next Generation started, which served as a pretty good jumping-on point for new viewers. I remember old school fans saying “It’s nothing like the old Star Trek“, but that’s probably why I liked it. I had never been a huge fan of the few episodes of TOS that I’d seen up to that point, but this just felt more…interesting. In a modern setting, the TOS fans would go on the rampage, berating Paramount for “What they did to Star Trek!” I’m sure it happened back then, too, but all they had were zines and convention panels where they could express their displeasure. They didn’t have much of a voice, and surely not much of an amplified one. I was able to explore the franchise at my own pace, but there also wasn’t a ton to dig through. By this point, there had been 3 years of a series that I hadn’t cared about, and roughly 4 movies associated with that (None of which I had seen at that point). So, there wasn’t a lot of source material necessary to understand TNG. The beauty of the timing, though, was that I was able to go back and examine that stuff, and still get through it. By the time the 3rd season of TNG was airing, I had seen 3 of the movies, and watched most of TOS. It was doable.
You can’t say that now. Now, the sheer amount of lore is so daunting that it must serve as a deterrent to newcomers. Plus – and a lot of folks don’t talk about this enough – there is an anxiety that accompanies these things. All of the “catch-up” begins to feel like homework, and you begin to wonder if you interpreted something correctly, or watched it in the right order. To further explore the mental health component, the entrenched fans will swear “Oh, you don’t have to watch/read all of that to understand”, but anyone with ADHD and/or OCD will tell you it doesn’t work that way. Personally, when I get into something, I go ALL IN. I can’t cherry pick. If I discover a new podcast, I have to go back to episode 1, even if their latest episode is #231. I have an obsessive personality (amongst other things), and I simply acknowledge how I’m built. I also recognize that I’m not the norm, but I’m also not alone.
So, there have been times over the past 20 years, where I’ve thought, “I wonder what Doctor Who is about.” I could never take the plunge, however, because I feel there are too many factors going against it. First off, it’s a 60 year old franchise. Sure, there were some “dormant” periods, like 1990-2004, broken up by a mere blip from a Fox TV movie in 1996. The series came back in 2005, and that’s when everyone climbed aboard. That’s when it “mattered”. My problem, however, is I can’t just start with the 2005 season, and act like the stuff before it didn’t happen – especially given it’s a franchise that makes no bones about insisting that *everything* happened and mattered. You may not know it at the time, but there are frequent callbacks to things that require you to ask a British person over the age of 55 what’s going on. Also, I can’t just go back and watch from the beginning, as there are YEARS of episodes that are just missing. Gone. Poof. The BBC didn’t keep stuff back then, and many were taped over. There were some reports, about 15 years ago, that they’d found some random African warlord appeared to have copies of the missing episodes. I wouldn’t be lying if I told you I’d be more interested in watching the story of how he came to own those episodes than watching the episodes themselves.
To even further complicate the Who situation, however, is something that doesn’t even commonly occur with American franchises: the audio drama. In the UK, there have been decades of audio dramas, which are just what you think they are: basically old-timey recordings of adventures that, in many cases, are voiced by the original actors from the show. These became especially important during that down period I mentioned, as they helped to “keep the Who spirit alive” with the fandom, while the BBC decided whether or not to revive the live action show. Like with the Star Trek novels, you could say “Those don’t count”, but don’t they? Especially given they were officially licensed by the BBC, and not mere fan fiction created by an overzealous corner of the fandom. Your opinion may vary, but for someone like me, and how I approach things, they not only count, but they’re also required in order for me to fully understand the property. That’s what I’m after here: full understanding. And that’s probably the problem, as you’ll notice I didn’t say “entertainment” or “enjoyment”. This is basically a case of “knowledge acquisition” to me, and the entertainment value comes second. In fact, you could say I am entertained by acquiring knowledge.
So, when I look at Doctor Who, the sheer mountain of decades of lore keeps me away from it. It also, however, leads me to wonder how anyone comes to the franchise now. Are there new Doctor Who fans and, if so, how did they do it? It’s no secret that the ratings for the show have been declining over the past few seasons. In fact, little is known about any future for the show following the current season. There’s a Christmas special for the current incarnation of The Doctor – the first black male (and queer?) Doctor, btw – but all talk of what follows has either been scarce or retracted. While obvious the viewership is declining, it’s unclear if that’s because old fans are walking away or that they’re simply dying off. What is clear, however, is that no new fans have stepped in to replace them. This is what happens to all things. “Everything has a season, everything has a time…”
But what happens when the entire entertainment industry is built upon nothing but these aging, inaccessible franchises? Paramount is bleeding money, and one of its most valuable assets is the Star Trek franchise. And that’s not even enough to get them out of the hole, as Star Trek has never had the financial success of Star Wars. I love Picard and the crew, but nobody would even consider paying Paramount the same $4 billion that Disney paid George Lucas. Not then, and certainly not now. So, Paramount is fighting a battle on two fronts: first, the fight for its own survival, but the second is figuring out how to revitalize Star Trek to the point where it doesn’t alienate the old fans, but also feels fresh enough to get new folks to give it a try. That was the point of the 2009 JJ Abrams film reboot. That was the point of the Paramount+ shows. And I’d have to say neither approach has been completely successful. At this point, it feels like our best bet would be for Disney to throw $800 million at Paramount, and then hire the world’s biggest nerds to craft a crossover between their 2 space franchises.
At the end of the day, it feels like we’ve reached the point of Diminishing Returns with our “tried and true” franchises, but no one seems to have gotten the memo. The question, however, is “Where does it end?” And, surely, I can’t be the only one deterred from exploring new-to-me franchises, simply due to all of the prerequisite work required to understand the property. Pretty soon, Disney is going to be trying to get blood from a turnip when it comes to Star Wars, while it seems the first (?) queer Doctor Who protagonist may have proven to be one Doctor too many. This is after The Doctor was a woman for the first time. Ya see, these fan bases hate change. They want new, while also adhering to preestablished rules and expectations. Any deviation from said rules and “what came before” is considered a betrayal of the franchise itself. This leads to a loss of old fans, while not necessarily bringing in new ones. And what then? WHAT THEN?
