Have you guys noticed that no television shows actually die out these days? Whether they’ve been gone for a few months, a few seasons, or a few decades, almost everything gets revived, including recent resurrections of ’90s favorites like Full House (via Fuller House on Netflix) and The X-Files (via… The X-Files, again, on Fox). Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel watched all of the new X-Files and some of Fuller House (tune in to hear who watched all thirteen episodes!), then got together to discuss this trend: other examples and forms of TV revivals, whether it’s worth it for these shows or in general, and how we feel about the future of television revivals, reunions, and resurrections. Also, find out just how insulting Jesse can be to the memory of Full House!
How To Listen
We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
- You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
- I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
- I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
- SportsAlcohol.com is a proud member of the Aha Radio Network. What is Aha? It’s kind of like Stitcher, but for your car.
- You can download the mp3 of this episode directly here.
- You can listen in the player below.
- The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Biggest Holiday Movies of 1995 - December 22, 2025
- The Long-Awaited SportsAlcohol.com Anniversary Podcast Double Feature: 1985 and 2005 - November 30, 2025
- The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Oscars Special 2025! - February 25, 2025
I have apparently a lot of thoughts about this. The biggest one is Jesse not realizing this whole podcast could be about Degrassi and someone else had to bring it up towards the end is maybe his least self-aware moment ever.
Degrassi and Doctor Who were in my notes as pretty popular current examples, and I was both surprised I was the one to bring up Degrassi and kicking myself for forgetting to mention Doctor Who during the recording.
I was also thinking about Doctor Who as I listened, but the trajectory of that show is so out of the ordinary I almost feel weird counting it.
TV show I would bring back: Alpha House. Mostly because not too time has passed and they would do a really good job in this political climate.
I realized after the fact that TERRIERS could come back, no problem, wouldn’t bum me out and would actually get me excited.
I change my answer to Terriers.
Yes, yes, more Terriers!
And if we’re doing political shows, I’d also say Political Animals. I guess I was into Sebastian Stan before it was cool.
I don’t know whether to agree with you since it seems like a show I’ll really dig when I finally get a chance to see it, or if I hope it’s gone for good so Trudeau will get back to doing daily Doonesbury…
Daily comics are definitely something I follow less fervently now that I don’t read a daily newspaper. I’ll take more Alpha House over Doonsebury because that’s just how I am. They had a scene where a very accurate Reagan impersonator gets booed off the stage at a Republican retreat episode that also featured a Janel Moloney/Bradley Whitford scene.
Also, show’s been off the air (off the stream?) for over a year, so I don’t think it’s affecting Doonesbury any more.
Checking back in here because I’ve now watched both seasons of Alpha House, and I totally agree and wish they were doing a third season. The second season sets up some intriguing stuff AND it’s a bit of a cliffhanger AND I would love to see their take on this election (though the craziness of the real thing seems like a tricky thing for them to negotiate).
And yeah, it’s been a relatively long time since they were in production, but the last time Trudeau said anything about it was here http://blogs.gocomics.com/2015/10/45-years-of-doonesbury-a-letter-from-garry-trudeau.html where he talks about it being the reason Doonesbury is still on hiatus. And while I’d love more Alpha House, if it’s truly over then I hope he returns to the daily strip. It’s his life’s work!
Full House is the fucking worst. It is a bad show that has taken up too much space in the cultural conversation ever since my parents’ tyrannical decision that basically my little sister could watch whatever she wants and I had to just go along. She watched an hour of Full House reruns every weekday. I was cool with it when I was 8, but had aged out at 9.
Is it sexist that it gets dumped on because girls like it? I don’t think it’s unfair in the sense that it is that bad, but I would say it’s sexist that revivals for things boys like don’t get the same scorn.
I don’t really see much scorn out there for Fuller House, so maybe even perception of coverage is gendered?
I just want to find a way to talk all the crap about Full House.
I didn’t mind that last episode of the X-Files as much as some. I thought it was the weakest one, but not much worse than the first one. The thing that irked me was they said ‘Alien DNA’ a lot and it just sounds…of.
Also, this feels like as good a place as any to share this text I got from my dad out of the blue. I don’t think he has ever watched the X-Files before this relaunch.
Awkward construction aside, I think the last episode felt weirdest to me because of the scale of the disaster it was depicting. Like, when they come back for another batch of episodes, it’ll be to a world that has experienced a devastating pandemic at the hands of the conspiracy. That sort of large-scale, widely visible thing didn’t really happen in the original series and while they did a fine job of raising the stakes to a pretty hardcore cliffhanger, they did it in a way that seems pretty hard to walk back from. Still, whether I trust them to pull it off or not, I kind of dig the foolhardiness on display!
Also a LOT of that last episode involves Scully talking to other doctors about what might be the cause or solution to the pandemic (hence saying “Alien DNA” constantly) — it’s kind of a weird gambit to have your big season finale rest partially on one of your characters, essentially, dithering back and forth while thinking aloud. At least in the first one, some of the extra Carter talk was in service of getting us back up to speed with these characters.
This has me thinking a lot about Joss Whedon’s TV. As someone who loved Firefly (like I stayed home on Friday nights to watch it), the weirdness of Serenity really sticks out over time. One reason Firefly may not have gotten a lot of traction is because it’s only explained in a director’s DVD commentary that China and The US were the dominant superpowers when the earth went bad and that’s why people sometimes talk in Chinese. There was all this effort in this complicated backstory that they had to ignore without totally excising it for the movie.
And Dollhouse. Oh Dollhouse. A show that would have been perfect on Netflix (as by Joss’ own admission takes like 7 or 8 episodes to get going).
My problem with Dollhouse was that the show felt like it was insisting on making Eliza Dushku the main focus even after it became clear that some of the other dolls were more interesting. When it seemed like Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman were starting to steal focus, Eliza got MEGA POWERS and became a SUPER DOLL. Meh.(Also Topher was the worst. And too many people were revealed to be dolls. That show had problems.)
It sounds like you just didn’t like Dollhouse, which is a different thing from what I’m saying.