I posted about this on my Facebook and on Twitter, and it sank like a stone both places. So I’m trying here.
Disney has decided to reboot Doogie Howser, M.D., gender swapped and moved to Hawaii with a diverse cast. The first episode is pretty much the same as the pilot of the original, with some scenes repeated line by line. I thought it was a perfectly nice show, though I’ll probably not keep watching since I’m in no way the target audience. But that’s not why I’m posting !
Get this: In one scene we see the protagonist interrupt her driving test to do some doctoring to an injured man, copying a scene from the original exactly! But then minutes later we learn that in this new show the show Doogie Howser, M.D. exists! The protagonist’s first name is Lahela. Her colleagues call her Doogie because she’s a child prodigy doctor like Neil Patrick Harris’ character. But her life is the same show!
(Envision “Mind blown” GIF with Barney from HIMYM here.)
I saw a promo for this show over the weekend, and another somewhere with a Black reboot of “The Wonder Years” *, and yet another animated Star Trek series. I guess Hollywood really has run out of ideas!
* Didn’t we do this already with “Everybody Hates Chris”?
It’d be hilarious if he was the same “real NPH” that showed up in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Probably not Disney Channel appropriate, which would make it even more hilarious.
Yes… that was my point. An adult narrator relating stories of his childhood. Did we need to do that again? (The new Wonder Years apparently has Don Cheadle as the narrator.)
On the other hand, I’d probably watch a Wonder Years reboot before yet another “fat white schlub with hot wife” sitcom.
It’s not like this new Wonder Years is only the 2nd version of this sort of show. Fresh of the Boat (well, the first season at least), the Goldbergs, etc.
From the trailer, the show seems pitched as more of a naturalistic dramady than the sort of single camera sitcom that would typically have a laugh track.
The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, Big Shot, and Turner & Hooch are all pitched that way, and none has a laugh track. Diary of a Future President looks like it might be more of an old-school sitcom, but I haven’t watched that one, so I don’t know if it has a laugh track.
Over the last couple of decades, it seems to me like the traditional single camera sitcom with a laugh track has become less common, and more naturalistic comedies and dramadies, where a laugh track would be intrusive, have become more common. I think we’re long past the point where studio executives insisted that Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night had to have a laugh track because all half-hour comedies had to have a laugh track.
It did have more serious tones after the 8 minute point where I posted. The show has an odd tone–the serious parts are at the level of a prime-time medical drama and the humor is at the level of a Disney-Nickelodeon tween comedy. (At the point I noticed the absence of a laugh track and posted, the Doctor Daughter and her Boss Doctor Mother were compairing their viral-video style dance moves in a hospital hallway–the lack of canned laughter screamed out.) On the one hand you have patients dying (telegraphed from a thousand miles away) but on the other hand you have, for example, a father who is a doofus surfer-dude type who quit his day job to start a food truck that sells shaved ice and flowers. And Doogie’s best friend is a sitcom-level Kimmy Gibler type, crushing on her stereotyped clueless older brother.
