My experience is that the result of trying to replicate or revisit something you felt nostalgic about often ranges from puzzling to truly regrettable. Unless you know exactly what about it made you feel the way you want to feel again it’s likely it will be missing that special sauce, and if you’re unlucky it might swallow your original memory whole. There seems to be a whole lot of revisiting going on these days in the world of film and tv with remakes, reboots, spinoffs, and nostalgic homages to 70s and 80s culture. My take on remakes has usually been, “do we seriously need another one of those?” but then I considered how many zillions of times operas like La bohème or plays like Death of a Salesman have been performed and it shifted my perspective.

This train of thought all started with how much I’m enjoying the clever callbacks to 1970s/80s detective shows in Rian Johnson’s Poker Face and Robert and Michelle King’s Elsbeth. Charli Cale (Natasha Lyon) has an uncanny ability to know for certain anytime someone is lying. It gets her in trouble with a mob boss and she ends up on the lam, drifting from place to place solving crimes through a combination of bullshit detection and tenacity. Elsbeth is a spinoff from The Good Wife, featuring the quirky but brilliant lawyer, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), as an outside observer for the New York police department. She solves cases with equal tenacity, a less magical sense of when people are lying, and a truly excessive number of tote bags. Both Natasha Lyon and Carrie Preston are channeling Peter Falk’s Columbo in different ways, with misleading vagueness, rambling stories, and last-minute questions that turn out to be sharp as knives.

Both shows have an old-style episodic case-of-the week structure, with a lot less of the narrative superstructure that seems to plague or infuse so many recent shows, depending on how much you like an overarching dramatic narrative in your mystery series. Poker Face really leans into the resemblance to older shows, from the credits to the effort cinematographer Steve Yedlin put in to make digital film look like celluloid to the Quantum Leap-ish conceit of Charli being in a totally new place and job each episode. Both shows are also a return to “howcatchem” as opposed to “whodunnit”, where the audience knows who committed the crime and the challenge is how the detective is going to prove it. In short, they do a fantastic job of drawing on older shows in a way that captures something great about them while still being entirely new, creative series.  

One step closer to the world of remakes are shows like the 2024 Matlock or the 2020 Perry Mason prequel, which are actually very different from the originals to an extent that seems like mostly a marketing gambit to me. Madeline “Matty” Matlock, played by the fabulous Kathy Bates, references the old Matlock show when she introduces herself, so it’s a world where that show exists, but other than that and the fact that she is playing an older lawyer it’s basically a different show. I also have trouble drawing a line from Matthew Rhys’ gritty, noirish version of Perry Mason to Raymond Burr’s gruff but affable one, which author Erle Stanley Gardner thought embodied the character. I enjoyed both series, but they left me puzzled as to why they couldn’t have just been new shows altogether.

All of this highlights the central challenge of a successful remake or revisioning, which is bringing something new and interesting to it while keeping the core of the character or story intact. Spinoffs offer the most flexibility for characters to evolve, but they still have to be recognizably themselves. If the creators incorrectly identify the immovable elements that make that character/story who/what they are and try to change one of them then it becomes something different masquerading in the skin of the original. In the worst case you get something like Disney’s live action Lilo & Stitch (2025), which appears to have eaten the heart of the lovely 2002 animated version, with its chosen family that was not broken and did not need to be fixed.   

Despite the pitfalls, people keep remaking things and it’s not all just studios being conservative or looking to cash in on a new generation of viewers. The impulse to remake a classic movie or show is basically the same as the one to mount a new production of a play or opera: this is so great! It inspires me and I want to do it with my own twist. Temporal performance art like theatre, opera, and classical music rely on it, with productions of existing works often outstripping new works in scale and popularity. Some are standard versions but many directors make a point of setting them in radically different ways, like modern day Shakespeare adaptations or director Peter Sellars’ filmed Mozart’s Da Ponte operas which included Così Fan Tutte set in a Cape Cod diner and Don Giovanni set in 1970s Harlem. I personally would have loved to see the L.A. Opera’s 1930s Jazz Age Così set at the fictional Wolfbridge Country Club!

For permanent recorded mediums like books and film, though, the original can always be watched or read again, so reproducing it exactly tends towards redundant. That said, there are a range of stories where remakes are common on the film-equivalent level of classic plays, for instance Jane Austen or Agatha Christie adaptations, and some where reboots are even built directly into the structure, like superhero stories or Doctor Who. Reboots are intrinsic to Doctor Who in a way that I can’t think of a parallel for anywhere else, which is awesome even though the periodic regeneration of the Doctor into a new body means that no one gets to spend the entire series with Their Doctor. And then there are some places, like the realm of classic movie monsters, where revisionings have branched out and expanded like endless catacombs.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has begotten remakes, unofficial doppelgangers, sons, daughters, brides, and distant relations in a way that seems entirely appropriate to a creature who might fictionally have sired just such a web of vampiric spawn. The through line from the book to the Bela Lugosi (1931) and Christopher Lee (1958) classics has already branched with the 1922 Nosferatu, which basically put on some Groucho glasses and tried to look innocent as Max Shreck lurked in the shadows under the pseudonym Count Orlok. (Max Schreck is *my* Nosferatu, BTW). Stoker’s widow filed a lawsuit and won it, with the ruling being that all copies should be destroyed,  but of course people did what they always do and scrambled to make copies so Nosferatu survived to spawn its own remakes. Christopher Lee made Dracula charming and Francis Ford Coppola returned him to repulsive with Gary Oldman. Coppola added a wife to motivate him turning away from god and now it looks like there is a 2025 version coming out that builds off of that story – a permutation on a permutation.  

Which brings me full circle back to where I started, with a somewhat altered appreciation for remakes but nevertheless a strong preference for spinoffs and homages. Like the comic kaleidoscope shift of Renfield joining a toxic relationship support group to escape Nicolas Cage’s appropriately gross and pathetic Dracula in Chris McKay’s Renfield (2023). Or the extremely entertaining live role-playing podcast The Adventure Zone vs. Dracula, where the Adventure Zone peeps create hilarious original characters, including a high society lady Frankenstein and a religious brother trapped in a wooden puppet, and many shenanigans ensue as they go on a quest to kill Dracula. Each session is introduced with a snippet from Dracula’s diary read in a Bela Lugosi style, pining after his lost love or processing his partying relationship with the Wolfman, and I find it quite believable that Dracula might just be that emo after hundreds of years. Princess Bubblegum and Lemongrab in Adventure Time are probably my favorite take on Frankenstein, and I know there is a new Frankenstein coming from Guillermo del Toro, but what I really want to see is the tech bro interpretation of Victor that Gutter editor Carol Borden so aptly called out in Actually, It’s Mister Frankenstein.

Once enough versions of a story or character exist, there’s a kind of broken telephone quality to it that creates both a fascinating web of permutations and an interesting reference trail. Each new version can be a catalyst that sparks new evolutions or cause a mutation that dilutes the power of the original. The good news about there being hundreds of versions of Dracula is that it’s almost certain Your Dracula is out there somewhere waiting for you.   

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Alex MacFadyen is not sure whether he would love to see a Poker Face and Elsbeth crossover or if it would drive everyone nuts, but they should definitely consider it. He also apologizes for misleading anyone who wanted to read about Vampire’s Kiss .