Reboot Review: A Sitcom Better Off Shelved

It takes a few episodes to get there, but Hulu’s Reboot eventually settles into a marginally tolerable groove. It helps that it largely abandons its initial default mode of winking self-awareness, which is established in an early scene set in a pitch meeting at the Hulu offices. Up-and-coming writer Hannah (Rachel Bloom) proposes an “edgy” revival of the fictional sitcom Step Right Up, which has credits patterned after TGIF-era staples like Full House. The numbers-minded executives rattle on about the demographics of other such reboots and revivals, and, in short, indicate that it’s a swell idea as long as the original cast returns.

With one crack about how “brave” it is to greenlight more seasons of Hulu’s own The Handmaid’s Tale, this early scene is about as subversive as Reboot gets. Indeed, for whatever jabs it may make at the corporate machine that includes both Hulu and the TV industry at large, it reserves a warm space in its gooey little heart for all of its characters.

For one, viewers are meant to sneer ever so slightly at bureaucratic incompetence when the network’s young head of comedy (Krista Marie Yu) says that she has no experience in the genre, but the series dedicates most of her screen time to a budding romance with Zack (Calum Worthy), the now-grown actor who played Step Right Up’s requisite cute kid. Even when Gordon (Paul Reiser), the sitcom’s domineering original showrunner, arrives to gum up the works, we’re meant to slowly come around and hope to see him grow a little as a person.

These sitcom dynamics only accumulate across the eight episodes provided for review, calling into question how deep Reboot’s self-awareness actually goes. Gordon mumbles into a tape recorder to add more “old lady” jokes as if to establish his fondness for easy, hacky targets only for subsequent episodes to use similar jokes in total earnestness. Although the series is shot in a handheld style—further underscoring the apparent reality of the production scenes compared to Step Right Up—the actors still play everything at a caricatured sitcom register. That tone particularly clashes in the early episodes, which throw around explicit language and sexuality as if to justify the show’s presence on a streaming platform.

In retrospect, perhaps Reboot’s faux-realism should have been a red flag. Though it lacks interview cutaways, the style is plainly meant to evoke creator Steven Levitan’s work on Modern Family, whose legacy lies mostly in underscoring the unadventurous tastes of Emmy voters. Where that show was one of many post-Office mockumentaries, Reboot plays more like an exceptionally late attempt to catch the long tail of meta sitcoms. Its most obvious counterpart, 30 Rock, was doing these jokes to much more stinging effect over a decade ago.

The show’s overqualified cast—which also includes Keegan-Michael Key and Judy Greer—at least wring mild comedy from even hackneyed cracks about clashing age groups and the sort of timing-based gags that tend to involve the phrase, “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” This more straightforward approach replaces the more meta jokes over time, as if the writers eventually recognized that Reboot is barely any less sitcom-y than what it’s lampooning.