Reboot, the Comedy About Reboots, Is Now Dead the Same Week Fawlty Towers Is Rebooted

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The type of irony that comes with life imitating art (that is, as fate would have it, imitating life) is one of the cruelest kinds. It comes at a level that very likely won’t be fully grasped until years from now when media historians or cultural critics take a look back at the early decades of the 21st century and how TV and movies found itself to be a box office/ratings obsessed Ouroboros.

Reboot, the satirical sitcom that aimed to skewer Hollywood’s obsession with old IP and any and every generation’s nostalgia, got the axe at Hulu last week and was subsequently being shopped around, with the hope being that it’s über clever writing would find its audience on another platform that wanted to give it more time. Creator Steve Levitan announced this week that the quest to keep Reboot alive had unfortunately ended, spelling out a one season one or Reboot being a “limited series” in the annals of TV history.

At the same time, the news that a reboot of Fawlty Towers, a sitcom from the 70s that highlighted John Cleese as a star separate from Monty Python, arrived. That’s just the latest reboot in a plenty of reboots/revivals/sequels that have happened in 2023 alone (you’ve peeked at That ’90s Show haven’t you?), which we can only surmise that the media conglomerate powers that be (the ones that Succession shines a very bright light on) have no interest in having their core strategy being sent up in an entire TV series… yet.

Will there ever be a time where that changes or will we be stuck in a perpetual cycle of cash grabs from things we kind of loved from our childhoods, so long as we’re at the age range with the most disposable income? Well, let’s see if Reboot ever gets its own reboot.