According to Donald Bain in the 2010 book, Tied In, 35 Murder, She Wrote novels were still in print and had a total print run of 4.5 million copies! Factoring in the notion that tie-in novels only sell to a slim margin on the source material's core audience and one can see that Murder, She Wrote still has a very sizable fanbase. In his essay, Bain goes on to say that he regularly participates in lectures on what is primarily a Murder, She Wrote fan cruise on the QE2. Clearly with a fan cruise(!), 35 novels still in print, and 2 more contracted to be coming from Bain (at that time); Murder, She Wrote is still an ongoing business concern with a dedicated fanbase.
My mom and grandma were fans and they're both dead, so I guess your point is valid. Thanks for the reminder.....
Battlestar Galactica is proof that rebooting an old show can have fantastic results. I have no problem with reboots/remakes as long as they're good. Many suck, but then most shows suck, period.
And then there's the American versions of foreign TV shows. If we just stuck to our own stuff, we never would have had All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Three's Company, or Ugly Betty. (yes, I realize I'm cherry-picking the successful ones.)
Every forensic detective show on air is a rehash of CSI. Rehash, reboot, what's the real difference? One's the exact same show with different character names, the other is the exact same show with the same character names.
Breaking Bad is being remade for Columbia TV. http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/10/02/breaking-bad-spanish-walter-blanco/
I'd draw a distinction between Colombian TV making their own Spanish-language version of Breaking Bad with Colombian actors and locations, and NBC doing a remake of Murder, She Wrote.
They tried to do a Prisoner remake a few years ago and it was terrible. Not sure whose idea it was to take a very abstracted, conceptual show and approach it like David Lynch's dimwitted cousin, making even more bizarrely abstracted and conceptual only without any solid consistent themes or personality. Such a waste of Ian McKellan.
All this and yet no reboot of The Greatest American Hero. If any show is just screaming for a reboot it's that one. Not that I'd be in favor of it, but you'd think someone would be all over that.
What I don't get about the whining about reboots is that this is a Star Trek board and TNG was for all intents and purposes a reboot of TOS. Sure, it was set after TOS and had new characters, but at the end of the day it was the same concept slightly tweaked for an 80s audience. As Star Trek fans, shouldn't we be more open to the idea of rebooting? Batman The animated Series was also a reboot of Batman on tv and they have been rebooting the franchise constantly, there's Batman show after Batman show and he also appears in unrelated to each other DTV movies DC keeps releasing, they're also currently rebooting the movie franchise. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has also its fourth tv series airing at the moment and the franchise isn't even 20 years old. But Takeru, those are based on comic books and the tv shows target children. So what? It's all media and entertainment. A good show is a good show and a bad show is a bad show, if it's a reboot or continuation of an old show or an original work doesn't matter at all to me.
Star Trek and Batman have numbers stories to tell, there is never a shortage. Murder She Wrote was around 12 years, are there more stories to be told? The answer is no.
Really? Modern Star Trek was around for 18 continuous years and rehashed storylines were a big criticism of Voyager and Enterprise. You could even argue that Star Trek ran out of new stories in the 60s and Batman has been telling the same stories for decades, so that's not an argument against rebooting or continuing a series.
I ignore everything that happened in Voyager and Enterprise was only called Star Trek for 22% of it's run, so I really ignore that. :-p
I thought they added 'Star Trek' to the title at the beginning of season three? That would make it more like 45-50%. I will not rest until I see a Homeboys in Outer Space reboot!