Why So Many of Your Favorite New Shows Are Exercises in Nostalgia

I recently started watching Tina Fey’s 30 Rock reunion enterprise The Four Seasons with the lowest of expectations.

The Netflix show has Fey bringing many of her writers from the TGS days to revive an Alan Alda movie from her youth, with buddies like Will Forte and Steve Carell along for the ride. Reviews were middling, the comedy writer goes dramatic trope is, well, a trope, and the whole thing smacked of an NBA veteran load-managing so he could keep cashing that paycheck.

Yet as I continued watching the show, it became clear that my fears were misplaced. Yes, The Four Seasons is a nostalgia exercise — sometimes literally, as when Alda himself shows up as a character’s father. But the Netflix show has plenty to say about midlife — that peculiar zone when you’ve accomplished so much but don’t know where to direct the energy to do more — a theme that could easily be a metaphor for Fey’s career but also applies as a broader Gen X critique.

Also, Colman Domingo does some of the best winking scenery-chewing work on his magnificent resume, and who wouldn’t want that? If Fey had leveraged her 2000’s-era success to get this throwback on the air, at least it was to a good end.

Looking through our screening queues at the start of this Emmy season, we feel the strong breeze of nostalgia. Most directly, with Max’s The Pitt, Noah Wyle, R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells’ return trip to an emergency room. But the air of television from a few decades ago blows at us from other directions as well. Look at how Dan Fogelman structures Paradise with its character-revealing flashbacks that suggest he just binge-watched the first two seasons of Lost. Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace seem to have huffed an entire boxed set of Friday Night Lights before sitting down to brainstorm Landman. Or The Studio and its Entourage-y guessing games. With Andor, Tony Gilroy and Kathleen Kennedy put us back in the Star Wars timeline like it was 1977 (or 2015) all over again.

There are exceptions; Apple TV+’s Severance breaks through as something we’ve seldom seen before. But a whole lot of scripted TV gives me that old familiar feeling. Even the most recent season of The White Lotus, for all its buzz, at times felt like a dutiful extension of what was once the freshest show on television. I don’t know if a series can be nostalgic for itself, but if it could, Mike White has managed the feat.

One might be tempted to read in this a downcast trend, another sign of Hollywood’s poverty of ideas. Certainly the upfronts that recently concluded don’t mount a strong counterargument as greenlights tended toward the renewals of the long-toothed, fatigued or the revival of the not-so-lamented gone. Among the most attention-getting of the pickups (speaking of Carell) was Peacock and The Office creators trotting out their new show, a mockumentary shot at a mid-city newspaper, complete with the return of Oscar Martinez and his smarm.

Plenty of this bend toward nostalgia has to do with talent. One of the downsides of network television ruthlessly chasing quality in the 2000s — in the second half of the decade you could sometimes watch new episodes of 30 Rock, 24, Friday Night Lights, ER, The Office, Scrubs and Lost in the same week (not to mention The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad on cable) — means that years later, many of the people who worked on those shows still hold sway, not leaving a ton of room for new voices. And younger creators who didn’t work on those shows came of age watching them.

Some of it also has to do with the business. The full-on cable age that soon supplanted network dominance and the streaming age that later took over from cable have all, let’s be candid, run a little low on momentum. None of those three mainstays of the television industry are flush with cash and heat — something that could not have been said at a single other moment of the past three decades — which means naturally lower odds of something daring getting developed.

And some of this nostalgia is simply a function of executive timidity, a feeling that if consumers are so frazzled and overloaded in this doomscrolly age, best to give them some conceits they’re familiar with.(TV executives might want to call their film counterparts across the lot to see how that one turns out.)

Yet despite all these reasons for disappointment, as this Emmys season kicks off I find myself hopeful. Because less important than the nostalgia of this TV moment is how such history is carried out. The Pitt may have some of the same auspices as ER, but it’s a cutting-edge approach — like someone devised a show on the thought experiment, “What if we took the groundbreaking serialized shows of the late 20th century and redid them with the vérité urgency of the modern moment?” Who wouldn’t want to see Dr. Robby asking relatives to step outside in such a circumstance?

Andor is special too, building a whole new narrative of resistance despite its familiar world. In fact, in some ways it corrects what J.J. Abrams didn’t a decade ago. That first Star Wars film revival struggled to give us a reason for its existence, as did so many extensions of the franchise since then. Until now.

Landman, meanwhile, offers some of the best television set in Middle America, and with a killer Jerry Jones cameo to boot. And for all the ways Paradise gets by on sleight of hand, I’m not sure there’s been a more addictive show in years. Watching it reminded me of television 20 years ago, yes — but also in the sense of “remember when TV watching was intensely pleasurable?”

This is not a rah-rah column, and it won’t be as the season unfolds. We won’t be afraid to call out platforms if they misstep and showrunners when they take easy way out. But in watching so much of this season, I can’t help feeling a wave of reassurance.

Is Hollywood going back to the well? Sure. But it’s a deep well. Is it out of ideas? Original ones are harder to come by, but it’s putting some pretty fabulous spins on old ones.

Because sometimes, when everything is falling apart, you just need Liz Lemon to come in and make everything OK.