12 TV Shows We Need to Bring Back
Those brilliant TV execs resuscitated and de-cheesed Battlestar Galactica. They gave Bionic Woman a shiny new set of innards. Why stop there?
Hawaii Five-O
The setting means plenty of purty gurlies in tiny ‘kinis; the surf-side ‘tude similarly lends itself to easy modern-day translation. Plus, it’d be so, so nice to view a procedural detective drama whose entire existence doesn’t hinge on the gathering of semen evidence at ripped-from-the-headlines crime scenes.
The Waltons
Remember how they updated The Honeymooners on the big screen with Cedric the Entertainer and Mike Epps? HUGE laughs. Three words for you then: The. Black. Waltons. Bernie Mac as the patriarch, one of the kids from The Wire as John Boy—this thing practically casts itself.
Profit
Nobody remembers this one, in which a pre-Heroes Adrian Pasdar played what might have been TV’s first Tony Soprano/Vic Mackey–ish antihero: Jim Profit, a corporate sort inclined to beat, blackmail, intimidate, or otherwise neutralize anybody who gets in his way. Dark comedy doesn’t play all that well on network TV, but any of the cable or pay channels could pull this one off with aplomb.
The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
It was a sci-fi show. It was a western. It was a comedy. It was… all three! Plus, you gotta love any TV show, movie, musical, Kabuki performance, or Internet viral doohickey that prominently features Bruce Campbell, even without the buckets of blood and sloppily cleaved torsos.
M*A*S*H
War = funny! Make this happen, liberal Hollywood.
Fantasy Island
It’d be interesting to see if a network could reinvent this ’70s show without a heavy dose of kitsch, as there remains infinite promise in the island-removed-from-reality concept. But you know they’d just muck it up with dumb-ass titles like Fantasy Island: The Next Generation! and wink-wink, nudge-nudge cameos from the likes of the muy macho Ricardo Montalban.
I’m With Busey
The only question: whether there are enough tranquilizers, stun guns, and straitjackets to keep Gary Busey in line for another 15 or so episodes. We suppose the folks behind 24 would be up to the challenge.
ER
For our money, TV can’t ever feature enough sexy doctors making sexy-doctor faces while doing sexy-doctor things. Like making out or tripping over the pronunciation of “urethra,” or… What? ER is still on the air? Whoa. Who knew?
Anything involving Sheriff Lobo (B.J. and the Bear and/or The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo)
Nobody—and we mean nobody—put itinerant truckers with deviant chimpanzee fixations in their place like dear old Sheriff Lobo. Since the actor who so deeply inhabited the character, Claude Akins, has since shuffled off this mortal coil, let’s replace him with a hip, wisecracking priest…or something.
thirtysomething
Pretty white people with clear skin who are very much in touch with their feelings… Talk about demographic gold. We’d add an interactive component, too, in which viewers could vote online for the character they’d like to see beaten with a mallet until he or she loses consciousness.
Arrested Development and Police Squad!
No changes or nothin’—just bring them back exactly the way they were and we can pretend that the decision to cancel them in the first place never happened. All will be forgiven.
Read This Next
