'90s TV Shows That Deserve A Reboot

Most folks who have been watching TV long enough to remember wrapping foil around the antenna to get better reception for their favorite shows can also recall a time when reboots and sequels tended to be derivative cash grabs rather than quality additions to a well-established canon. While the latter isn't necessarily the standard for every modern return to an existing series, it's certainly nice to be living in the era where quality reboots tend to be the rule rather than the exception. Just look at how 2003's "Battlestar Galactica" transformed a beloved 1970s sci-fi series into a brilliant analysis of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy, or how the 2015 sci-fi series "Twelve Monkeys" reimagined Terry Gilliam's post-apocalyptic time-travel film as a reason for optimism against what was once considered impossible odds.

If network execs are looking for quality material to harvest, 1990s television served up a veritable gold mine of great shows just waiting for a comeback. From mind-bending sci-fi to experimentation with surrealism and absurdism that was way ahead of its time, many of the best '90s shows had a cult following but couldn't sustain the ratings they would likely draw on streaming channels today.

The much cooler little sis of "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys," "Xena: Warrior Princess" debuted in 1995 and picked up a massive fanbase over its six-season run — a following that would love to see the series make a return 24 years after its controversial ending. Like "Hercules" before it, "Xena" reimagines legendary tales from ancient mythology, weaving in history and anachronisms to create action-packed adventures full of swords and fists. "Xena: Warrior Princess" elevates the sword-and-sandal genre into a tale of female empowerment, redemption, and love as former warlord Xena (Lucy Lawless) turns away from a life of bloodlust and instead commits to spending her days righting the wrongs of her past with her soulmate, Gabrielle (Renee O'Connor), by her side.

Hardcore fans will recall the show's run ended with Xena sacrificing herself in "A Friend in Need," but Xena's deaths don't tend to stick. Given her demises by poison dart in "The Greater Good," battle injuries in "Destiny," and crucifixion in "The Ideas of March," there's no reason she couldn't be resurrected yet again. And given "Xena: Warrior Princess" sports a generations-spanning timeline, it wouldn't be hard for fans to adapt to their sheroes fighting side-by-side in a later season of life. While a reboot may not be completely off the table given the fact that then-NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt announced one was in early development back in 2015, sadly, Lawless says she's done playing Xena. Still, a fan can dream.

Given the recent death of perennial dreamer David Lynch or the fact that the director gave his genre-defying surrealist crime series "Twin Peaks" a long-overdue third season back in 2017, it might seem like an odd candidate for a reboot. And yet, there are many reasons to imagine the series getting one more chance on this side of the Black Lodge — not the least of which is the fact that the story was never really finished.

A mere synopsis can't really do "Twin Peaks" justice. On the surface, it's a tale about a small and uncannily quirky Pacific Northwestern community grieving after the murder of their picture-perfect homecoming queen, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), and the investigation that follows, helmed by gentle-spirited oddball FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). But scratch the surface, and you find a dark supernatural horror that explores themes of identity, duality, familial dysfunction, and secrecy, themes further explored in the much darker prequel film, "Fire Walk With Me."

Filmed and set decades after the show's original run, the Showtime-produced third season, "Twin Peaks: The Return," cranks up the dial on the strange, supernatural, dark, artful, and surreal elements of the story thus far. While Lynch originally intended for fans to interpret many of the show's central questions on their own, he was not entirely opposed to adding yet another chapter to the story. Although no one could replace David Lynch, one could imagine a director like Jonathan Nolan giving the "Twin Peaks" story closure in a reboot.

Few sci-fi stories are more ripe for a reboot than "Sliders," the episodic '90s series that followed a group of friends "sliding" through wormholes from one parallel universe to the next in their seemingly hopeless "Quantum Leap"-like journey home. The trouble starts when grad student Quinn Mallory (Jerry O'Connell) starts tinkering with string theory in his basement laboratory. His efforts at cooking up an anti-gravity device instead yield a remote control that creates temporary wormholes into an alternate version of his reality.

Because it totally makes sense to trust the guy who accidentally opens a parallel universe portal, Quinn drags his best friend Wade (Sabrina Lloyd), his professor Maximillian Arturo (John Rhys-Davies), and unwitting bystander musician Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) on a test run, only to learn that he can't actually get them back to prime Earth. The best they can do is to continue sliding through the multiverse, spending anywhere from minutes to days on worlds that range from being a little off from their Earth to entirely foreign realities. Despite the nearly improbable odds that they'll ever make it home, the four have no choice but to randomly slide through other dimensions as many times as it takes, hoping that the next slide might take them back home.

Between today's vastly improved VFX, the growing scientific interest in multiverse theory, and the proliferation of binge-friendly streaming services, now is the perfect time to do this story the justice it deserves with a retelling that fleshes out the lore while staying faithful to the original.

Aside from the odd "Goosebumps" revival and a few middling "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" wannabes, there really aren't many good kids' horror series popping off these days. You know the kind — just spooky enough to give kids a good chill and introduce them to sci-fi and horror tropes without providing any nightmare fuel they'll be working through in therapy sessions for years to come. And that's exactly why we need a revival of "Eerie, Indiana," the bizarro kids' comedy-horror series set in a version of the actual Eerie, Indiana, that feels more like the paranormal magnet community of "Welcome to Night Vale" than a standard rural American town.

The series follows the Teller brothers, Marshall (Omri Katz) and Edgar (Francis Guinan), as their family moves to the town of Eerie only to find it's a place where alien abductions, alternate dimensions, and dogs plotting world domination are all just part of life as usual. While short-lived, the series amassed a cult following that only grew with the show's 1998 spin-off series, "Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension."

Like its predecessor, the sequel was doomed to the same fate every cool, quirky series seemed to meet before the advent of streaming video. But a mid-2020s "Eerie, Indiana" reboot that reimagines the Teller brothers in yet another dimension has a ton of possibility to succeed as an epic addition to the saga while tapping into the analog horror vibe that Gen Alphas love so much.

It's hard to overstate the cultural impact of the short-lived 1990s series "My So-Called Life," which starred a teenage Claire Danes as the emotionally turbulent Angela Chase, a typical American teen going through the growing pains of adolescence on the journey to finding her place in the world. In an era when most TV shows painted teenage life as simple, "My So-Called Life" did a good job of depicting the challenges of navigating complex relationships like changing friendships and parental interactions in a time when most people don't quite know themselves yet. Difficult topics that had previously been the domain of "very special episodes," like drug use and eating disorders, were treated with nuance and dignity, and the show really stood out for its normalized presentation of an LGBTQ character in Angela's good friend Rickie (Wilson Cruz). The series also served as a first break for Jared Leto, who played Angela's high school crush despite being almost eight years older than Danes.

Just as "My So-Called Life" still stands out as an empathetic and insightful look at the emotional roller coaster of teenage life in the Xennial reality of the mid-90s, a reboot could examine life for today's teens in a way that, frankly, the world needs to see. We've got an entire generation of kids who missed a year or more of school due to the pandemic lockdown and now face issues like an unprecedented loneliness epidemic and online relationships. They deserve to have their stories told.

Decades before Chris Elliott went to Schitt as the eponymous mayor of "Schitt's Creek," he played a 30-year-old bicycle-riding paper boy living in St. Paul with his retirement-age parents on the absurdist cringe comedy "Get a Life"  — oddly, somehow, looking almost identical to how he looks today. When the series debuted in 1990, there was really nothing like it on television. The episode "Neptune 2000" revolves around Chris putting together an actual mail-order submarine he ordered as a child, while "Spewey and Me" finds him rescuing a crash-landed alien that literally spews unpleasant bodily fluids from his mouth. Over the course of the show's two seasons, the only thing that truly makes sense is the naive little weirdo personality of its central character, performed brilliantly by Elliott — and that's perfectly all right. 

Read through the show's overwhelmingly positive IMDb reviews, and you'll see a common theme: the firmly held belief that this show was way ahead of its time. It's the kind of show that predicted Daniel Thrasher's surrealist sketches and Tim Robinson's absurdist "I Think You Should Leave." Since Elliott has had decades to refine his craft and the world seems to make a lot less sense than it used to, it's a perfect time to check in with our favorite paper boy and see how things are going in the Twin Cities. 

Long before Joe Rogan became a somewhat divisive podcaster, he played an adorable handyman in the eccentric workplace comedy "Newsradio" alongside a hilarious ensemble cast that included Stephen Root, Maura Tierney, Phil Hartman, Khandi Alexander, Andy Dick, Vicki Lewis, Jon Lovitz, and "The Kids in the Hall" co-creator Dave Foley. Set almost entirely in the office of AM talk radio station WNYX, the series revolves around the workplace lives of the station's coworkers under the direction of their generally out-of-touch billionaire boss, Jimmy James (Root).

Instead of an unrealistic work-family mythos, "Newsradio" presents quirky but believably familiar characters and relationships, like the blunt, outlandishly dressed Beth (Lewis) or the uncomfortable and ultimately unresolved office breakup between Dave (Foley) and Lisa (Tierney). And much like its contemporary series "The Drew Carey Show," "Newsradio" often integrated over-the-top storylines that played well against its naturalistic office relationships while providing commentary on many workplace issues of the day, like corporate pressures to turn a profit and gender and race dynamics.

Now, imagine a reboot of this series set in the 2020s world of political censorship, controversies surrounding DEI, corporate buyouts, and fake news. There's so much potential for great storytelling, a reboot would almost write itself. Dave Foley seemed amenable to the notion in 2022, telling "Bleeding Cool," "I would be interested because I love and miss all those people. I'm still friends with all of them. I would love to do anything with any grouping them."

1990's answer to "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" often felt more like a fever dream than a typical teen comedy. Colorful, caricatural, and charming all at once, the story follows the life and times of the titular Parker Lewis (Corin Nemec) along with his tight-knit crew of buds inclusive of Mikey (Billy Jayne) and the stereotypically nerdy Jerry (Troy Slaten). Airing on Fox for three seasons, "Parker Lewis" was one of the first shows to unite fans through a fervent internet following and has been memorialized by several musical artists, including Childish Gambino, Naughty By Nature, and House of Pain, among others. Many guest stars who either were or would later become famous appeared on the show, including Milla Jovovich, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Ozzy Osbourne, Michael Dorn, Penny Johnson Jerald, Curtis Armstrong, Sonny Bono, Scott Wolf, and most of the cast of "Beverly Hills, 90210."

Part of the show's signature style is the use of fourth-wall-breaking, self-referential humor and hyperbolic, surrealist elements that seem to convey Parker's perception of reality — details like gentle giant classmate Kubiac's (Abraham Benrubi) massive tears cracking the linoleum flooring or the new principal who transforms the school into a high-security prison in "Saving Grace." And that's to say nothing of the constant deep-cut pop culture and news references that make the series something of a time capsule. A reboot infused with Gen Z or Alpha humor and an influencer angle could be equal parts weird and hilarious.

Much like "Coneheads" before it, "3rd Rock From the Sun" was a fish-out-of-water concept about a group of extraterrestrials trying to make it through the everyday challenges of life as regular old human normies. The series follows High Commander Dick Solomon (John Lithgow) and his crew Sally (Kristen Johnston), Harry (French Stewart), and oldest crew member Tommy, played by the then-teenage Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as they take on human form to study life on our planet the way we would study chimps. To keep the folks back home in the loop on their progress, the crew regularly reports in with the Big Giant Head (William Shatner) by way of the chip in Harry's own dome.

While French Stewart has said there are no plans to reboot the series with the original cast, the story and world-building could easily transfer to a whole new crew sent to follow up on the original team's study. To keep things on track, maybe they could bring Harry or Sally on board, which could leave the door open for occasional cameos from the show's bigger-named actors like Lithgow or Gordon-Levitt.

"Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction" was one of those low-effort guilty pleasures that, quite frankly, the world could use more of these days. Originally presented by Josh Brolin's actor dad, James Brolin, the series was hosted by "Star Trek" actor Jonathan Frakes after its first season. Each episode presented a handful of short, often cornily acted stories that were either allegedly true or urban legends, with the viewer kept in suspense as to which was which right up until Frakes dropped the big reveal at the end. Stories ranged from glitch-in-the-matrix events to seemingly supernatural warnings, with many reflecting the kind of creepypasta you might find nowadays browsing a subReddit. The series was actually revived for the German market, where the show has a cult following, airing from 2021 through 2024 under the name "X-Factor: Das Unfassbare (The Unfathomable)."

With more streaming networks pushing for cheap-to-produce content, a shiny new reboot of "Beyond Belief" could be just what the doctor ordered. Bring on a label-defying producer like Jordan Peele, who found time to produce reboots of "Scare Tactics" and "The Twilight Zone" in between his mind-bending horror film productions, and it could prove even better than the original series.

David Cross and Bob Odenkirk have gone on to do some pretty amazing things since they starred in the Monty Python-inspired HBO sketch comedy series "Mr. Show with Bob and David." Cross's role as Tobias Funke in "Arrested Development" is easily one of the best comedy performances of the 21st century, and Odenkirk underwent a complete transformation from his early days as a sketch comedy actor to his critically acclaimed role on "Better Call Saul." But long before any of that would come to pass, both of these legends made a huge splash on this comedy show chock full of piping-hot 1990s comedians, like Sarah Silverman, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jack Black, and Paul F. Tompkins.

The series stood out thanks to its absurd, surrealist, and often whimsical style of humor. One bit imagines "Rap: The Musical," a family-friendly "Mary Poppins"-style theatrical performance that contains no rap music. In another sketch, "Pre-Taped Call-in Show," David Cross plays a radio host frustrated by callers who keep calling in about the subject he's talking about rather than the subject he'll be talking about next week, pleading at one point, "If you wanted to talk about the elderly, you should have called last week when our pet care show was airing, but we were taping the elderly show ... If you wanted to talk about pet care, you should have called two weeks ago when our show on racism was airing." The time has come for more of this, please, Bob and David.