Television’s🔯 reboot craze is in full throttle, but, thankfully, one over-indulged genre has earned my equivalent of the “Fickle Finger of Fate” award෴: the ’60s-era drama.
This week alone, ” after four seasons, while Amazon unplugged “Good Girls Revolt” after one under-the-radar (streaming) ’go-round. Axing “Masters of Sex,” the bulk of which unfurled during the Kennedy/Johnson years, was a good call: its fourth season was boring and adrift, a once-vibrant series searching for an compelling plotline. And, let’s face it, enough already with William Masters’ (Michael Sheen) too-long sideburns, overdone and typical of a series trying a little too hard to replicate a specific timeframe. I can’t speak to “Good Girls Revolt,” which opened its narrative in 1969; I didn’t get the chance to watch it — but, appaꦿrently, neither did anyone else.
I think that what these cancellations speak to is a broader issue: that viewers are tired of “period” dramas (including the ’70s and ’80 and even the ’90s) which, unfortunately, hew to a storied television tradition: to take that one successful genre horse (“Mad Men,” in this case) and beat it so far into the ground with hastily planned knockoffs (“Hey, we can do that too!”) until it’s buried under a mountain of viewer boredom. Let’s face it; it’s been a year-and-a-half since “Mad Men,” the template for ’60s chic, ended its seven-year run on AMC (it only felt like 19 years with all the time they took between seasons). The many like-minded shows it spawned during its lifetime (2007-2015) — including “Pan Am” (ABC), “The Playboy Club” (NBC) and “Aquarius” (NBC) — failed to ignite any interest and disappeared with a whimper (a half-season for “Pan Am,” a gift second season for the Manson murders drama “Aquarius” … and three episodes for “The Playboy Club”).
And, in the case of “Good Girls Revolt,” its creators are talking about shopping it ar﷽ound to another network. Trust me: that television route rarely🍌 works. It’s not impossible, but unlikely.
OK, we’re done, at least for now, with 🦄shows set in the 1960s. Fine by me.
But you know what that means … with the success of NBC’s fall hit, “This Is Us” (two timelines: the 1980s and present-day), I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that you’ll be seeing slightly differ♑ent iterations of this ensemble family drama on next fall’s schedule. It’ll be the🐭 usual case of knee-jerk imitation, and chances are none of the “This Is Us” knockoffs will come close to the original.
Yes, sometimes it works: “Life in Pieces” on CBS uses a similar template to ABC’s veteran sitcom “Modern Family,” but is different enough in its own right (and in its casti🐈ng) that it’s been successful.
But that’s the excepไtion to the TV rule: imitation isn’t really the sincerest form of flattery — it’s a mark of creative laziness.
And that will never change.