Remaking a TV-series in the old style

Now with TV-series like Full House being remade, I’m wondering how it would look in 2015. Obviously it will look very different, but would it be possible to make it seem like it was made in the early 90s?

How difficult would it be to make a series that looks like it was made in the early 90s or 80s, or possibly earlier. Could you make something that could fool people 100% of the time?

On The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, they sometimes do a segment of Soul Daddy, Larry’s purported 70s talk show. They do a pretty good job IMO of recreating the look and feel of a cheap, UHF, urban talk show of the era.

Give the budget of The Nightly Show, it can’t be too expensive or time consuming to do this. So a regular TV show shouldn’t be a problem. As long as you stick to 4:3 SD. (Which can easily by achieved by taking the recording and copying to a U-matic tape somewhere along the line.)

Fool people? as in, “this was made 20 years ago, but no one knew about it until a couple of weeks ago, and BTW, if you run into one of the actors in public, they all just have Dick Clark syndrome, that’s why they look the same age as they did in the series”?

I don’t know. The problem with retro shows is usually that the point is the retro-- Happy Days was about the 1950s, so it’s more 50s than Leave It to Beaver, in that, for example, it mentions lots of people by name, such as the time when Richie wanted to work for some political campaign that was the party his parents didn’t support (I don’t remember who). I don’t remember a single politician’s name ever being mentioned on LITB. Happy Days did episodes about things like people not going to a party at someone’s house because a black person would be there. There was never a LITB episode like that. The LITB producers couldn’t count on a particular audience reaction or sympathy, whereas by the 1970s, the producers of HD could count on the audience wanting the party to be integrated.

Also, retro shows tend to exaggerate the fashions, partly for comic effect, and partly because they want to constantly keep the era in the fore. That 70s Show had some wild fashions (I was never a regular viewer, though, so, no examples). Compare it to One Day at a Time. The clothing barely registers as dated. Valerie Bertinelli has a Farrah Fawcett do for a couple of seasons, but beyond that, the show is not nearly as marked as you’d expect one with two high schoolers to be. The Partridge Family has a more dated look in regard to the fashions (it’s also a little older than ODAAT), but it was about people who would have worn exaggerated fashions, and even it is not as marked as the fashions on throwback shows.

Then, there are topics that would cause audiences today to roll their eyes, but that you’d have to cover if you wanted the conceit that your series really was made in another decade. For example, virtually every show in the 1970s had a “bad computer” episode. Usually, it had a computer overbill a person for something, but there’re some variations. Invariably, someone who works with the computer insists that “the computer can’t make a mistake.” No one ever bothers to mention that a computer is only as good at the data entry tech. The TV show character bangs their head against the wall again and again, and the message is clear that computers are nothing but a headache.

If you did an 80s show, you’d have to stick in a few very special episodes covering topics that were big deals at the time, like someone unmarried having a child, or someone having a classmate with HIV. You’d also have to have at least one molestation or date rape (depending on the age of the cast and the demographic), and one “don’t do drugs” episode. When you CGI in your 80s celebrity to tell people not to do drugs, it better look good. Bonus points if you can pick someone who was super famous then, but either no one has heard of now, or has done something disgraceful in the interim, such as Dan Quayle (yes, I realize most of his VP term was in the 90s, but he was a senator before that), or OJ Simpson. Those people would be embarrassing to have on a show now, and no one would choose them on purpose now for other than verisimilitude.

What would be the point? This is the kind of thing people do for a grad project in film school. It’s like Gus van Sant’s Psycho remake: more of a curiosity than genuine entertainment.

Makes me think of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, good times :slight_smile:

Since this is essentially a discussion about tv, I’ll move it to Café Society from General Questions.

samclem, moderator

Rob “Meathead” Reiner created in the early 90s much like you describe…only as a 40s era Abbot and Costello type show called "the Lost Comedy of Morton and Hayes

‘Look around you’ ran for 2 series in the UK. The first was a perfect pastiche of 1970s science for school programs and the second one was a clone of ‘tomorrow’s world’ a science magazine show that ran for decades.
The look and feel were almost pitch perfect with period continuity announcements at the start. The content though was absurdist comedy so no one would ever mistake it for the real thing.

Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim aired both of these shows a few years ago, and they were great! They also aired all three seasons (series) of The Mighty Boosh. I have to say I preferred the simplicity of the first year of Look Around You to the second. Loved whenever they’d throw something in the trash can they’d shoot it with a large handgun several times!

You wanna make a show look like early 90s or older? Simply shoot it at 30fps. Even in hi-def it will look like old-school, ‘strobing’, in front of a studio audience, videotape.