By Imani Cage

Imani Cage was a Summer 2022 Intern at Novelly. Fresh out of Franklin High School, Imani Cage is excited to find more diverse voices and share their stories. Imani has over three years experience working with children with two of those years helping children read via Team Read. In recent years, she’s become a youth leader, participating in campaigns towards bettering her school, and even attending protests. She plans on majoring in Computer Science, with full intention on staying active in her community. Below is one of Imani’s best blog posts.

Enough with the reboots. Give us something new!

Aren’t you tired? We are entering a TV era where a lot of our entertainment is reboots of old shows. Everything we see doesn’t even seem original anymore. I love watching TV, just like  everyone else, but I’m ready for new and bolder ideas to come to life on screen.

Although repetitive, TV reboots have large viewerships. This is partly what makes reboots so frequent today; they already have a franchise to build upon and an audience that is ready to see the same characters with new stories. Fans of Full House raved to see Fuller House. They’re able to experience the nostalgia that comes with watching the reboot. This nostalgia gives fans and show producers a win-win situation; fans are happy to see their old characters again, and producers get a lot of money out of choosing a safe show idea instead of a new bold one.

Since reboots are so safe due to their already pre-existing franchise, they tend to get more money, which can be used to help produce newer and bolder ideas. If the new idea fails, it’s okay because the money from reboots will help ensure the company doesn’t go under. The only problem with this is that reboots have become addictive. They are no longer just a safety precaution, but instead actively take the place of new ideas that can be produced rather than supporting them.

Nostalgia has been a huge selling point not just for reboots, but for shows in general. One of Netflix’s most popular TV shows, Stranger Things, recreated the 80s aesthetic for adults to reminisce and for newer generations to experience. The show is so popular in fact that it made the song Running Up that Hill by Kate Bush skyrocket in popularity, with currently over 100 million views on YouTube.

It seems that we are not running out of ideas. We are too focused on replicating our feelings and nostalgia of the past. Reboots have existed since the beginning of television. It’s just that now we happen to have a high concentration of them. It isn’t bad to try something new! In fact, Squid Game, was so popular worldwide that it surpassed Stranger Things as one of Netflix’s top watched series. That show not only isn’t a reboot, but it uses our nostalgia of children games, which seems to have been forgotten in the age of technology. This show also seriously engages with socioeconomic inequality. The show provides something audiences can relate to in the past and in the present.

Similarly creative and innovative stories can be found on the Novelly website, with many Rising Voices authors publishing stories about issues they connect with. Share your own ideas by joining Novelly’s Rising Voices collective, so we can hear your bold ideas.

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