‘Those Were the Days’: The live televisual revival of the musical and retro family sitcom in the post-network era
Television is historically a generative site for examining media nostalgias. Within the ever-widening landscape of reboots, remakes and revivals across genres and platforms in the post-network era in the United States, an impulse to ‘redo’ live programming on network television has also emerged in the on-going battle for consumer attention. Steadily gaining momentum over the past decade, this article questions the roles that nostalgia plays in structuring the surprising return of fictional event-based television. The evolution of this phenomenon is traced by first examining the wave of live network musical productions (2013–19), followed by the restaging of Norman Lear’s classic sitcoms in Live In Front of a Studio Audience (ABC 2019). Nostalgia’s connection to positive emotion is a powerful marketing tool that is manipulated across industries, and specifically leveraged through airing reperformances of these popular and identifiably nostalgic texts. However, despite reaching new levels of nostalgic indulgence, the live televisual remake opens-up new opportunities for collectivity and critical reflection for viewers in the digital age.