Yet while many see salvation in the 90s revival craze, others question whether the early success of Roseanne can be replicated — and how much the business would benefit even if it could.
"I think any time you get those kinds of numbers it's good for those shows but also good for television as a whole, because it means people are watching," said Greg Berlanti, the film director and television producer, articulating the pro-revival camp's position. Berlanti (Love, Simon) is behind the new Sabrina, a more darkly inflected Netflix series titled The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. But others wonder about both the trend's appeal and long-term health.
"I understand that networks want brands to hold on to," said Jane Rosenthal, the longtime producing collaborator of Robert De Niro and co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, which this month will premiere a Karate Kid TV revival titled Cobra Kai.
But does it make for something original? Roseanne's popularity has been hard to deny. The first two episodes in the revived ABC series garnered a whopping 18.2 million viewers — more than any other show drew in the entirety of 2017 save one. The follow-up episodes notched solid totals of 15.2 million and 13.5 million viewers respectively, though whether nostalgia or politics fuelled it remains up for debate. This after a revived Will & Grace debuted to more than 10 million viewers on NBC last northern spring.
"There's a comfort food (appeal) from a simpler time, like why people still eat Lucky Charms or Honeycomb," said Snoop Dogg, taking a break on a recent afternoon from taping on a Sony soundstage. "And people need comfort food right now."
This television mac and cheese couldn't come along at a better time for Hollywood. It has been a rough era for the major broadcast networks, which rely on ratings to sell ads and ads to pay the bills. Last year, every network suffered declines in the key 18-49 demographic. NBC did the best, and even it dropped 8 per cent from the prior year. Fox performed worst, down 17 per cent.
A well-calibrated revival might change that.
Roseanne's return reignited interest not just in the series but the concept of big "overnight" ratings — the idea, thought obsolete with the advent of streaming and DVRs, that the right scripted programming can draw a large audience to simultaneously watch a show the first time it airs.
Hoping to drum up similar mojo, the WB has ordered a pilot for a Charmed reboot, recasting the witchy sisters who first took to the airwaves in the late 1990s and making them 2018-ready.
Danny Jacobson and Paul Reiser, who created NBC's 1990s marital staple Mad About You, have been in talks with studio Sony to revive the show.
The barrage of throwbacks can partly be chalked up to demographics, creators say. The 90s land in that sweet spot of appealing both to adults who spent their formative years watching these shows and their children who are now old enough to enjoy them — a kind of millennial reproductive effect. If you were 9 in 1990, you well could have a 9-year-old of your own to recruit to these programmes now.
The love for the era was recently evident with a glossy magazine reunion of Dawson's Creek, which nearly melted the internet without so much as a frame of new footage.
"I don't think networks want to be seen as looking backward," said Bruce Helford, an executive producer on Roseanne, who also worked on the original series.
"But I think with the timing of a show like ours you can get a lot of people who liked the first go-round at the same time as you get a lot of young people to discover the new show."
Helford also created The Drew Carey Show. (No revival of that in the works — yet.)
If Roseanne can't be replicated exactly, it can certainly be mimicked, say executives, who see 1990s nostalgia as much of a TV commodity as the police procedural.
Shows with figures from that era were "an antidote to times that feel chaotic and negative," said Holly Jacobs, the Sony Pictures Television executive who developed Joker's Wild.
"People want anything that reflects a time when they have a positive, safe association," she added, noting that Snoop conjured thoughts of the 1990s and the 1990s conjured thoughts of prosperity and tranquillity.
These reboots can even feel original, advocates point out, noting how a known property such as the Fargo film has been winningly reimagined for FX by Noah Hawley.
But others warn those are the exceptions. The dangers for the TV business, they say, could mount if TV bosses go too hard on the trend.
