HOT TAKE: I Will Take a Rewatch Podcast Over A Reboot Any Day Of The Week! Here's Why
I will take a rewatch podcast over a reboot any day of the week.
A hot take, but bear with me.
It seems that the number of reboots and rewatch podcasts are on the rise at fairly equal rates. Whether its the rise of rewatch culture, or an increasingly fervent nostalgia for less complicated times, people are constantly hunting for ways to breathe new life into fresh shows. The reboot and the rewatch podcast seem to be the top two answers for this question (with prequel and spin-off series coming through with honorable mentions.)
The intention of both the full show reboot and the rewatch podcast is to delve deeper into the world of the show, giving a predetermined fan base a sense of continuing their lives in a fictional world they have come to love.
By that description alone, it is easy to see how creating a reboot of a popular show would be the obvious answer. Reboots are, by definition, a continuation of a story. They often feature a different cast, or the same cast with an updated set of issues.
Yet, when it comes to re-living the joys of your favorite shows, I stand by the belief that the rewatch podcast has its finger on the pulse of what people actually want. Either cast members or real die-hard fans go back, watching every episode of an old and well-loved show, and engage in giving inside scoops, fun facts, and creating thought provoking discussions.
No, the story does not move forward, but does go deeper. The reboot creates the appearance of offering its audience more, while in actuality keeping its fans at an arm's length.
The rewatch podcast, meanwhile, invites their followers where they have always wanted to be: inside their favorite shows.
The reboot struggles to untangle a knot that was tied with the skill level of a proficient Eagle Scout. It is rare that a show with a massive fan-following ends without a word. More often than not, they are given some sort of warning. They have time to ensure that the show they created comes to a satisfying ending. Therefore, in order to create a reboot, this knot must be untied.
This ending knot was closure. New Girl, The Office, Parks and Recreation: these are all shows that fought to give their audiences satisfying endings. This closure allowed grieving fans to make their peace with the "passing" of the show.
The reboot unsettles that. It acts as if it is giving a show new life, when instead it serves as a ghost, haunting those who still remember the glory of its past life.
Sex and the City was an absolutely iconic show that still serves as the center of rosé
-filled girl's nights around the world. It was a campy delight, a girl-squad classic. Sure, it is always sad when a series ends, but people love to remember it for what it was.
(Furthermore, with streaming services, it can always be re-lived over and over again.)
This year, And Just Like That, the reboot of SATC, came out, and fans found themselves far less delighted. The characters they loved were different. The original whimsy was not present.
This is not a vote for or against the new show, nor is it a comment on its overall quality, but fans came in expecting to see more of their favorite story, and instead found something completely different: a shell of the show they remembered, with new content - which, while it may be interesting, is not what SATC fans wanted.
In a way, it served to give them hope, only to make them sad all over again that their favorite show is, in fact, over.
The rewatch podcast, conversely, does not seek to untie a well-held knot, but rather looks backwards, and, through focused attention to detail, turns a strong knot into a beautiful bow: still tightly tied, while now even more beautiful to look at.
They examine how the knot was made, why it was tied that way, and EVEN has behind the scenes gossip, not only about the characters but about the actors as well. (We ran out of knot-related metaphors, sorry.) This gives the listener the feeling of truly being there, involved in the world they have, so far, loved from a distance.
The Office Ladies Podcast was one of the first - or at least one of the most instantly popular - rewatch podcasts, featuring former cast members of the hit show. When Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fisher started examining every small detail of every episode, they reminded us of someone: ourselves. The rewatch podcast allows the fan a chance to obsess over the show with people who were once on the show.
If that isn't every number one fan's dream, I'm not sure what is.
If someone is a top fan of something, where they recognize that their insatiable quest for more of their specific show will either lead them to watching a reboot or listening to a rewatch podcast, the odds are they believe their show to be perfect.
I, for example, am a MASSIVE fan of both Gossip Girl and New Girl. It is interesting, now, to compare the two, because Gossip Girl went the reboot route and New Girl has just started up their rewatch podcast.
I believe these shows are perfect. Am I baised? YES OF COURSE I AM! Obviously there are things that were said or done in the early 2000s which, when you return with a 2022 lens, you think to yourself, "Oh...nope...that would not have happened today."
Yet still, as fans of something are wont to do, these shows hold a special place in my mind where I firmly believe that, all in all, they got it right.
The reboot of Gossip Girl, therefore, unfortunately falls victim to a naturally unavoidable comparison to perfection. Oh, I liked Blair's outfits the best. Oh, Serena was absolutely iconic. Oh, where are the flip phones?
Is this unfair of me? ABSOLUTELY! Even by the end of Gossip Girl, no one was using a flip phone. However, this natural proclivity to comparison is inescapable. The reboot is tasked with the obligation, in the eyes of the fan, to live up to perfection: a burden the original show never had to deal with (which is what ultimately allowed it to blossom).
New Girl, on the other hand, is still in the infancy of their rewatch podcast Welcome to Our Show, and I am, quite frankly, obsessed. From the first moments, we are getting all of the intimate details about casting, episode one, the dynamics, the screen tests, and more. On Monday's episode, we learned that the reason Jake Johnson and Zooey Deschanel didn't have any many season one storylines together is because they apparently had "TOO MUCH CHEMISTRY."
The details that we find in these rewatch podcasts give new heart to a show we didn't know we could love anymore. ALSO, IT'S GREAT TO HEAR THAT THE CAST MEMBERS ARE ACTUALLY FRIENDS. It tricks our minds into thinking, "Well, if they're friends in real life, that means that I can be friends with them in real life, and it means that all of us can go and live in apartment 4D!"
Which is...(sadly) not true, but the heart wants what it wants.
With the reboot, we lose the magic we once loved because, like the rest of us, the essence of the reboot needs to grapple with the reality that these characters would have moved on with their lives. They can't be exactly where we found them before.
There is no way, in moving forward, to go back to that original comfort - and that is what people want from their favorite shows: comfort. For, in a weird, twisted way, the characters on these shows become our friends, and the point of going back is seeing our friends again.
With the rewatch podcast, we get to talk with them. With the reboot, we find ourselves having to meet new people. At that point, I'll just go outside.
All in all, you can do whatever you want. But I'll be here listening to my favorite show all over again.
