Bringing beloved comedies back from the dead is usually a bad idea. The best ones, like Starz’s cater-waiter-com, lean into the discomfort.
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By James Poniewozik
In the new season of “Party Down,” returning to Starz Friday after 13 years, an ambitious pastry chef (Zoë Chao) whips up a platter of experimental cake bites. Outside is a sweet, fluffy layer of confection. Inside is a core of aged Camembert. “You get an innocent childlike sweetness up front, followed by an earthy whiff of decay,” she says. “It’s a rumination on mortality.”
I don’t know if I would want to eat it, but it may be the best symbol I have ever seen for watching a beloved sitcom’s revival.
The familiar sugar rush is immediate. But what lingers on the palate is the reminder that everything must come to an end, and perhaps should have already.
Sitcoms in general, but especially ones about young characters with dreams and ambitions, have built-in expiration dates: Things can go on for only so long before they get depressing. Ross and Rachel must move away; Pam and Jim must get out of that stultifying office. To catch up with them in middle age, to ask what happens after happily ever after, is to risk making everything too real. Comedy is tragedy plus time, they say, but it is also true that tragedy is comedy plus time.
Nonetheless, TV today is in the “more” business: More “Veronica Mars” and “Murphy Brown,” “Saved by the Bell” and “Mad About You,” “Will and Grace” and “Beavis and Butt-Head.” “Sex and the City” became “And Just Like That”; “Full House” became “Fuller House”; “Roseanne” became the new “Roseanne” became “The Conners.”
The history of TV, of course, is TV repeating its history, through spinoffs, reunions and imitations. But it’s the explosion of cable and especially streaming outlets that has made so many revivals possible.
(A quick definition of terms: I’m distinguishing “revivals,” which bring back part or all of a series’s original cast to continue the story, from “reboots,” which remake series with new actors, like “Quantum Leap” and “Magnum P.I.” It’s a useful distinction but one rarely observed — for instance, in the short-lived Hulu spoof “Reboot,” which was about a revival.)
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