The following contains spoilers for Reboot Season 1, Episodes 1-4, now streaming on Hulu.
Picture a comedy charting the tumultuous behind-the-scenes activities of a fictional comedy program, starring a cast of beloved actors and from one of the small screen's most popular producers. This is Hulu's Reboot, created by Steven Levitan (Modern Family, Just Shoot Me) and starring Judy Greer, Keegan Michael Key and Johnny Knoxville as the leads of the popular family sitcom Step Right Up, reassembling 15 years later. The central cast is rounded out by The School for Good and Evil actor Rachel Bloom as the visionary behind the new iteration and Paul Reiser as the creator of the original series. But that also ably describes a misstep by another TV impresario.
Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premiered just months after the end of his hit drama The West Wing. Studio 60 charted the realities of network television and sketch comedy in a political and polarizing era. Friends' Matthew Perry and West Wing alum Bradley Whitford played Matt Albie and Danny Tripp, who took over long-running late-night sketch comedy series Studio 60 after its Lorne Michaels-esque creator resigned live on air. The team breathed new life into the series with sketches and bits met with unanimous positivity. And like the acclaim lavished on those fleetingly glimpsed sketches, the attention the new Step Right Up in-universe is unearned and bafflingly distracting.
Why Doesn't Reboot's Revival Work?
The scenes of the original Step Right Up seen in Reboot's pilot accurately replicated the look of a turn-of-the-century "TGIF" series, with corny jokes punctuated by a jarring laugh track and fittingly cheesy theme song. Unfortunately, there's little to differentiate those clips from the new scenes -- which also rely on bad set-ups, tired punchlines and an overblown studio audience. Some leeway is afforded because Reiser's Gordon Gelman is an old-school TV hand who wants the revival in the vein of the original series and goes so far as to assemble a writers' room of wildly out-of-touch hacks. It stands to reason that Gelman's efforts would result in some dated elements and tones rearing their head.
The primary issue with Reboot, akin to Studio 60, is the creative head(s) within the series being lauded for their groundbreaking material when instead it comes across as a weak imitation. For Matt and Danny, it begins and ends with the "Pimp My Trike" sketch, a limp parody of MTV's Pimp My Ride that wouldn't have made the cut on MadTV at its most derivative and uninspired. That an allegedly daring filmmaker like Reboot's Hannah Korman would resort to a trite global warming joke as the first guffaw in the new iteration of Step Right Up rings severely false -- and is just one of several fumbles.
How Reboot Compares to Studio 60
If Reboot's writers thought of the new Step Right Up as a send-up of similar family sitcom revivals like Netflix's Fuller House or Peacock's Punky Brewster, it makes sense that they would carry over a live studio audience despite the lack of them in current situation comedies (including Levitan's long-running hit Modern Family). Unexplained to any real degree is why the avant-garde Korman would write a pilot for the dated three-camera format -- or at the very least not object to it as some of the more egregious and hoary punchlines were added to her draft of the script.
During Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip's brief run, it became increasingly self-referential, with its entitled and overly serious tone called out by other characters and its budgetary issues reflected in-universe. Reboot doesn't reinvent the wheel and its stellar cast elevates material that might not work in lesser hands, but then the same could have been said of Studio 60. In order to avoid the swift cancellation that the earlier series suffered, Reboot needs a greater dose of reality and a less self-congratulatory tone -- or at least material worthy of the praise offered.
It might well be that this conundrum is Reboot's most clever and subversive joke. Presenting someone so rote and hackneyed as revolutionary may be subversively commenting on the medium in a profoundly unexpected way by a creator well-versed in the subject. But if it's not, it's a glaring flaw the Hulu series has to fix if it wants to survive into a second season.
Reboot streams Tuesdays on Hulu.