Since the Golden Age of Hollywood, sitcoms have been a staple in American entertainment and around the world. Everything of I love Lucy until friends falls under the definition of a sitcom, the history of which is extensive. While the traditional ones, made in the 1950s and 1960s, were filmed in front of a live audience, wider cultural shifts have changed the idea of what it means to be a sitcom. 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 latest release on their platform, Restartshows what it takes to bring back and adapt a fictional sitcom for a new lease of life in the age of streaming platforms.
The pilot of the series was ordered by Hulu in August 2022, while the series as a whole will be released in January 2022 was officially ordered for streaming. The premise is that a popular sitcom is brought back with a modern twist, leading to an all-new drama between the cast, the former showrunner, and the new as they try to make this reboot possible. At the same time, comic elements round off this story. The show tries to take the tropes of sitcoms and use them to advance specific points, such as how Hollywood always uses a bad but beautiful actor to boost ratings, or a comedy director at a streaming platform knows nothing about comedy beyond the elaborate research into the genre.
There were a few cast replacements before the series started filming, but now 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. Keno), and Calum Worthy (Austin & Ally). The series consists of eight episodes of thirty minutes each and is available on Hulu’s streaming platform. With a cast like this, many of whom have experience in comedy and sitcoms, expectations are high but fall short.
Bringing a popular sitcom back to life
The days of traditional sitcoms are long gone, left in their early to mid-2000s glory, but Hulu’s Restart seems to be reclaiming these nostalgic bits of memory with contemporary twists. In Restarta fictional sitcom titled come on was the pinnacle of the audience’s day, all the way back in the 2000s, continuing the conventional aspects of the genre during that period. There is the standard family with a mother and her son, along with two men who take on 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 not having many film credits to his name now, many years later.
As observed recently with the resurgence of other shows like iCarly or the endless biopics about musicians, all good things never really die when a writer decides it’s time to recreate come on in all its former glory with some new twists. And so the show kicks off in Hulu’s offices, as she puts it on the streaming platform in hopes of getting the original cast back together. The show, in true meta fashion, decides to end its direct references to Hulu pretty quickly, but there’s a lot of excitement in the air about what the revival might produce. The cast agrees to come back because it looks like their careers have gone down the toilet, or they’re struggling with their personal lives, leaving them chasing the glory of when they were on come on.
Hannah, the optimistic writer who puts it all together, will soon discover that the dividing lines that originally ended the show are also coming back, and that you need to adapt a sitcom to the streaming era. There’s some restless drama with the show’s original creator, and he has a falling out with Hannah, as her vision dictates that she wants to adopt the sitcom’s traditional modes. He leans a little more traditionally about what television can and cannot be, so naturally he clashes with Hannah’s views on what the show’s future holds. There’s more than meets the eye with their relationship, which ends up being some meta-jokes at the end of the first episode.
There is also an underlying element of workplace comedy to this story. The cast, which falls under specific archetypes, chooses exactly where they left their relationship: fragmented, smiling about certain memories over the years, with a lingering grudge about what happened in the past. A new body is put in a cast to make it look fresher, causing trouble because she doesn’t know how to act. Restart hashes through the same arguments between cast members, the original and new showrunner, adding a new element every now and then to try and keep things fresher than they are. However, anyone familiar with the entertainment and acting industry can nod in on the issues raised by the jokes as this is very relevant content in today’s world.
A comedy without humor
Sometimes Restart comes across as too forced. The humor runs along the lines of running contemporary events and culture, winking at specific shows, events, and politics to try and make the jokes land better. If the viewer wasn’t familiar with any of these concepts then it would be completely over their heads, and unfortunately there are many moments like this scattered throughout Restart. With its corny zooms and random cuts to the next scene, shifting perspective, Restart tries to make itself look a lot funnier than it is. However, the characters walk in familiar tropes: the actor who makes his entire identity to Yale, the actress who married rich and became Duchess, the child star who never seems to grow up and now writes a self-published all-encompassing memoir about growing up with ADHD.
Perhaps there is a great irony behind it Restart: The premise claims this is a reboot of an old popular sitcom, but it’s not an actual reboot. It’s a revival. A reboot would mean replacing the original cast with completely new actors, and that’s 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 comedy. Some pretty prolific meta-statements are made during the show, but the satire aspects are lost in the transmission. Is Restart 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 a little more character.
The characters live and breathe the archetypes they embody, and some of their motives don’t add up – why didn’t Hannah, who made an award-winning short film called “Cunt Saw,” do so much with this resurgence? Then there’s the child star who still acts like a child. His mom still goes with him to sit and nag him about eating sweets and not carrots, he has a rude sense of humor that would fit that of an 11 year old, and he doesn’t behave at all like his age. There’s so much potential to delve deeper into the trauma of being a child star and how it hinders mental development, but the show only uses it as a joke. At the same time, that one actor always brags that he went to Yale’s School of Drama, but he still struggles as an actor and needs validation. He is not alone in such a situation in the art world.
All this does not mean that Restart is fun – the thirty-minute episodes make it bite-sized and easy to enjoy in parts. Anything more and the casual viewer might find himself wanting to quit by the end of episode three. The actors do a great job throughout Restart, and given this cast’s resumes, it’s not surprising that they play these characters as well as they do. How they deliver some of these lines in full character is impressive, and what could end up making someone laugh. Sometimes that’s all that keeps a show going, and that’s what happens to Restart.
The first three episodes of Restart stream on Hulu on September 20, 2022. The other episodes are released weekly.