Despite airing 50 years ago, The Munsters still retains a strong cult following. So strong, in fact, that a reboot of the 1966 sitcom is currently in the works at NBC.
A modern take on the lovable monster family is being developed by Seth Meyers, Mike Shoemaker (SNL, Late Night), and Odd Mom Out creator Jill Kargman, who will write the pilot script. The reboot will see Herman, Lilly, and the rest of the gang trying to fit in in a hipster-filled Brooklyn rather than their traditional suburban home at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Even though Brooklyn hipster jokes were played about five years ago, I guess the idea is that they’ll still feel fresh when paired with a 50-year-old premise. The new series will also be a single-camera set up as opposed to the multi-cam format of the original, and will presumably be filmed in color.
A Munsters reboot has actually been attempted twice before, with mixed results. After the original series’ 1960s run was cancelled after two seasons, the show found a much larger audience in syndication, and its popularity grew over the next two decades. This led to the sequel/reboot syndicated series The Munsters Today, which ran for three seasons from 1988 to 1991. The series then underwent a more drastic reboot in 2012, when NBC aired the one-hour pilot Mockingbird Lane. Produced by Bryan Fuller, this was meant to be a darker, more dramatic take on the material, but proved unsuccessful as the network did not pick it up to series.
It seems unlikely that this new reboot will fare any better, but I could be wrong. Meyers certainly has some legitimate comedic chops, though it’s unclear how involved in the production he’ll actually be, and there clearly is still a draw to the fish-out-of-water story of a family of classic monsters trying to fit in in America. Plus, the ’90s Addams Family movies were arguably better than the original series they were based on, so who knows? Maybe the Millennial Munsters will end up being the best thing on TV in a couple years.
