The recent relaunch of Arrested Development on Netflix is simply the latest iteration of today's core maxim of television: What is old can be new again with the right audience. We've already suffered through rehashes of 90210 and Melrose Place. Next year, the Corey and Topanga saga of Boy Meets World carries on as Girl Meets World, and Jack Bauer will return to purple nurple more terrorists in 24.
That said, it's only logical to assume that with a modern cocktail of Red Bull and botox, our other favorite B-listers from the 90s and early 2000s will be charged up and ready to once again grace the Small Screen. As unlikely as the reemergence of the Bluth family, here are our top 6 picks for best cancelled shows to recycle:
1. Crane
Kelsey Grammar will once again reprise his Emmy Award-winning role of Dr. Frasier Crane in yet a third series (following predecessors Cheers and Frasier). After 20 seasons following the same psychiatrist character, NBC will want to add a new gimmick to lure in viewers. Stealing a time-traveling tactic from the Back to the Future trilogy, the writers will send Frasier and brother Niles (David Hyde-Pierce) back to the late-19th century London via a wardrobe in the basement of radio station KACL in Seattle.
Frasier and Niles will find that their pretentious airs fit perfectly into Victorian society, and will soon enjoy outfitting themselves in ascots and ornately patterned three-piece suits. Niles laments the loss of Daphne and his son, David, but is quickly distracted when he and Frasier are aghast to find that their cherished profession is dominated by educated perverts trained in treating women for hysteria (what Victorians called sexual dysfunction).
The brothers instead open up a talk-therapy clinic in the English countryside. However, finding no market for talk therapy, as the English are notoriously closed-lipped, Frasier and Niles are forced to psychoanalyze from behind the bar of a local pub, plying patrons into deep sessions with pints.
Each episode ends with a warm-beer cheers: "This is Dr. Fraiser Crane toasting your good mental health."
2. Fresh Prince of Gold Base
When ultra-actor offspring Jaden Smith gets in a fight with David Beckham/Posh Spice spawn Brooke in west Beverly Hills, mom Jada gets scared and decides to send him to live with Uncle Carlton (Alfonso Ribeiro) at a scientology retreat in Riverside County, Calif.
Eccentric effeminate Carlton owns an aerobic sweater-dance studio in nearby San Jacinto, where Jaden explores the surrounding community with best friend Honky Tonk, who often gets thrown out of the house by Uncle Carlton for being too fresh.
When not reading Dianetics or attending spiritual rehabilitation seminars in which he's asked to consciously re-experience painful or traumatic events from his childhood, Jaden can be found playing b-ball outside of the Purification Center.
3. Lost
ABC will bring back TV's most convoluted show, as the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 endure another six seasons of smoke monsters, polar bears and inexplicable electro-magnetism. Jack, Sawyer, Kate and co. will awake back on The Island with the realization that Purgatory, the church and Faraday's mother were all just part of a collective heat-induced coma that was generated by Dharma Initiative microwave beams.
The show's real conceit will be finding it on cable: viewers will be asked to type a sequence of numbers into their television remote every 108 minutes to find the channel on which it airs, as Lost is programmed to disappear from one network and relocate to another at random intervals. Viewers will also become mysteriously infertile.
Years later, we'll learn that Lost was actually an elaborate government program designed to test the maximum patience capacity of a dedicated TV show following.
4. My So-Called Life
Angela Chase has moved beyond the angst-sodden 1990s and is trying to survive her mid-30s with the same pluck and alt-radio resilience that served her in high school. Unfortunately, Angela still runs up against her same old struggles: expressing her own voice and finding luck in love.
Many of the men in her life find her intelligence and wit oft-putting, so Angela distances herself from the popular crowd and chooses a life with her own loyal band of misfits. Working titles for the reboot include Homeland.
5. El Casa, M.D.
Spoiler Alert! Last we saw Dr. Gregory House, he had faked his own death to ride a motorcycle off into the sunset with true bromate Dr. Wilson, as former patients and frenemies waxed poetic about his brilliant diagnostic accomplishments. The reboot starts up six months later, immediately following the death of Dr. Wilson from stage III thymoma (thymus cancer). Distraught, House hightails the Harley to Mexico where prescription pain medication is cheap, plentiful and easily accessible.
In yet another Vicodin-induced hallucination, Wilson convinces House that it's his destiny to open up a clinic in Oaxaca to treat children with Chagas disease -- a tropical parasitic illness ravaging Latin America that is transmitted via blood-sucking bugs. Thus House becomes a pediatrician, berating, mocking and simultaneously saving Mexican youth. The show will air on MundoFOX, a Spanish language American broadcast channel, as opposed to the normal Fox Network.
Hilarity ensues.
6. How I Met Your Stepmother
The original series isn't set to end until 2014, but it's plausible that with Ted Mosby's track record in love, the interminable raconteur could have just been filling time with an epic parable about the dangers of rushing into marriage.
With an animal magnetism that's almost as unlikely in nature as J.D. Dorian's on Scrubs, Mosby will likely blow it with Mom and spend a season relating scornful tales of divorce until meeting Wife No. 2.
Either way, the kids will still look miserable.