Reboot (Hulu/DisneyPlus)
I’ve been a fan of Steven Levitan’s TV shows for years without really being aware of it. I devoured episodes Just Shoot Me as a kid, went out of my way to watch Stark Raving Mad during its brief tenure, and slowly wended my way around to an appreciation of Modern Family after writing the sitcom juggernaut off for the better part of a decade. The same three traits unified his creations: incredibly smart casting, an interesting concept, and a thin seam of genre subversion running through a solid understanding of the core tropes. His most recent effort, Reboot, takes those traits and turns them up to eleven. The pitch is simple: an edgy young writer convinces Hulu to reboot an early 2000s family sitcom; as it comes together, we discover the original creator was her father, who walked out her mother and started a new family, then turned that new family into the core conceit of his hit sitcom.
