A Very Brady Renovation and BH90210 have found unusually surreal ways to revisit the past

The New York Times

HGTV's Brady Bunch home makeover show "feels like the logical progression of, and the perfect metaphor for, the reboot and revival craze that has brought us Fuller House and Twin Peaks: The Return, that exhumed Veronica Mars and Murphy Brown," says James Poniewozik. "The vast mechanism of TV and streaming has become a Star Trek replicator of pop culture. If I want to see Jean-Luc Picard on my TV again: Make it so! The Brady Bunch is the perfect show to reboot this way, because it has made a posthumous art of reproducing itself. Long before Friends liberated $100 million from Netflix’s pockets, it was the Patient Zero of TV nostalgia, extending its five-season life through reruns, spinoffs, TV movies, theatrical movies, cartoons, a variety show, memes ('Sure, Jan') and not a few tell-alls and documentaries. Its memory surpassed its actual existence. And memory is what HGTV is selling here — well, memory and its own brand."  Poniewozik, meanwhile, says BH90210 "is determined not to be just another reboot. So instead it attempts to be just about everything else. It is arch comedy; it is sentimental nostalgia; it is satirical; it is sincere; it is Hollywood story and middle-age story and sexcapade and horror story. It is, above all, a commentary on, and example of, the strangeness and sadness of trying to force the past back to life."