First Click: Netflix Unoriginals

Television provides entire generations of humans with a common historical experience. We drop catch-phrases as punchlines that everyone gets, while relating plot structures to real-life situations:

Oh, your wife was killed in a car crash? Maybe you can recruit your best friend and brother-in-law to help raise your kids just like Danny in Full House? That’d be hilarious.

Media executives know that nostalgia is the comfort food of entertainment. Reruns make us feel warm inside, memories warp mediocrity into a smile, making the trite feel extraordinary, the banal, exciting. Thus the onslaught of reboots, revivals, and sequels that have quickly become the norm for the industry. For every Inception there’s a Scooby Doo, Battleship, and Son of the Mask. For every Melancholia there’s a Blues Brothers 2000, GI Joe, and Speed Racer. Now Netflix is rumored to be reviving Full House, like the reanimated corpses of X-Files (on Fox) and Twin Peaks (on Showtime) already confirmed.

John O’Connor, New York Times TV critic and Irish cyborg killer, called the first episode of Full House “predictable” when it aired in 1987, suggesting the hapless-men-changing-diapers trope would appeal to women because “they may find watching men more diverting than keeping tabs on other women.” Uh hem. Growing up in the 80s as a teenage male who was neither mutant, nor ninja, nor turtle — I couldn’t care less. But lots of people did, and still do: Full House averaged about 1.2 million viewers this week on Nickelodeon.

Nostalgia is lazy, it’s playing it safe, and frankly it’s boring. Just because there are only seven basic plots to story telling doesn’t mean we can’t have unique characters with new personalities engaged in creative twists of fate. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to demand something original from so called “Netflix Originals?"