Pitch your dark, gritty reboot

Gilligan's Island with added cannibalism

Hägar the Horrible gritty tv show. just called Hägar. Hägar has PTSD from the atrocities he has committed raiding Britain, spiritual crisis when he wonders if he will get into Valhalla etc.

Sesame Street with Big Bird being ex-pimp

Street Sharks except it's the future and all the streets have been destroyed so where do the Sharks even go now

Sister Sister, where they have to fight out of an unjust and horrifying foster care system that separates siblings at birth

Scrubs with JD being an ex-pimp

Peanuts but concentrates on Spike, a coyote for hire who also dabbles in biker meth

Silver Spoons except where there's a whole different kind of silver spoon featured if you know what I mean (oh and also where little Ricky is an alt-right POS now)

Denver the Last Dinosaur, with Denver being an ex-pimp

Joy and the rest of the Bugaloos suffer from body dysmorphic horror and their love quadrangle, each week singing a new dirgy, _Disintegration_-type song.

Punky Brewster, where now she's an actual punk rocker. Who solves crimes for some reason?

he said that you son of a bitch (Neanderthal) at 3:27 4 Feb 21
Sesame Street with Big Bird being ex-pimp

Starsky & Hutch, with Huggybear as an ex-pimp who has returned to pimping.

The Sesame Street parody was the best Chappelle Show episode.

Starsky & Hutch, with Huggybear as an ex-pimp who has returned to pimping.

― Vladislav Bibidonurtmi (Old Lunch), Thursday, February 4, 2021 12:40 PM (thirty-one seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

snoop dogg's huggy bear in the 00s film was still a pimp and vaguely menacing iirc

Tintin, the problematic storyline, adapted by Spike Lee.

Doonesbury but all the liberal boomers are into Q Anon now.

Hereditary but gritty is in it

Doonesbury but all the liberal boomers are into Q Anon now.

hahahahaaaa

Mourinho takes over from Pochettino

this is one of best friend's parents who were definitely dope smoking democrats in the 80s and are now, we'll charitably say, Q-adjacent (and very MAGA obv). ;_;

xpost

Bob Ross except he's painting exquisite still lifes of bodies he has artfully dismembered.

Valerie, only when the titular lead actress dies instead of introducing a new character and renaming the show The Hogan Family, the family begins to lure new women into the house and murder them for parts so the can create a new vessel that their matriarch's spirit can resurrect into

Pinnochio is permanent trapped inside the whale, playing hand after hand of gin rummy with Jimminy Cricket, as each of them slowly devolves into madness.

The Exorcist but it's irony poisoning instead of demonic possession.

The Exorcist but it’s an unemployed woman masturbating with a crucifix on OnlyFans to pay rent.

Wizard of Oz with an endless succession of 'good' witches leading Dorothy further into danger without ever bothering to mention that her goddamn magic shoes can take her home anytime.

The Brady Bunch only the kids are all fucking each other

Max Headroom where instead of a digitized head on the tv screen it's a dick

a gritty dick?

Only Frewer knows for sure

DJP's Hogan reboot wins this round.

Dan is uh very good at this thread, lolz

esp the Hogan Family one

Perfect Strangers only it’s Fight Club

ngl i would take on another paid premium streaming service to watch Hogan reboot

My Two Dads, with both dads as ex-pimps

Jaded, pill-popping, foul-mouthed Slylock Fox takes on one last case.

Bosom Manor Revisited -- everyone is either part of a pedophile conspiracy or they are UKIP racist shits, like you have to decide whom to root for -- the paedos or the nazis

My computer that I brought to the beach and I dropped it in the SAND and then I spilled COFFEE on it and it FROZE so i had to hold down the power button

Multiplicity, with each duplication being a grittier pimp than the previous, with exception to the fourth duplicate, which is just Gritty.

Pinwheel, with Plus and Minus as ex-pimps

Trumpton, except it's set in an alterna-WW2 and the village has been occupied by invading Nazis

'Allo 'Allo but the French characters are collaborators tasked with hunting down members of the resistance and Allied airmen.

Full House, with Danny Tanner as an ex......

boxer

Mork and Mindy, if it was The Americans

ALF, with Alf being an ex-pimp

OK ok we get it.

Cheers. A documentary series following the dark lives of a bunch of severe alcholics and their road to recovey.

Lassie, where the show is exactly the same except that they've shaved the word 'TITS' into Lassie's fur

Silver Spoons, with Ricky Stratton being abducted from his home and being reprogrammed by a cult until he's age 10. he returns to his affluent house years later and is extremely violent and threatens his family members and the butlers. then someone in the family accidentally says the secret word and he becomes docile, but everybody fears the moment he'll go back to his violent self.

what about ALF but it's like a Norma Lear sitcom and Alf is a racist xenophobic blowhard who crashes into a working class latino family's garage

Instead of eating cats he just believes in a conspiracy where they secretly control the world.

ALF no longer stands for "alien life form", it stands for "All Lives Flatter", because he's not just anti-BLM and Thin Blue Line, he's a flat earth society dude.

also he keeps DAvid Lee Roth chained up in a cage

The Brady Bunch only the kids are all fucking each other

Wasnt this what was happening anyway

greg def got down w the mom iirc

they broke Marcia's nose with a football when she threatened to squeal to the cops

A succession of different wild animals worry at Steve Irwin's corpse

Facts of Life except instead of a school it's a convent full of pregnant teens

Reading Rainbow but if you misread a word or sentence wolves maul you

Leave it to Beaver: The Cleaver family appears to be as American as apple pie, however Ward, June, Walter (Wally) and their youngest, Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver are actually more like strudel. Relocated from their native Germany after World War 2, as a result of Operation Paper Clip, the Cleaver family needs to blend in with their new neighbors. Things are going well for them until young Beaver gets in a bicycle accident and begins having strange dreams where his name is not Beaver Cleaver, but Wernher Messerschmitt (named after family friend, Wernher von Braun) and his brother was named Walter after another friend of his father's, Walter Dornberger. While dealing with the struggles of being a stay-at-home mother, and her son's mental health, June is faced with her past. While grocery shopping at the local supermarket, a new teacher at Wally's school, Anna Unger, formerly a prisoner of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, looks shocked to see June and falls dead of a heart attack in the middle of the cereal aisle.

Go on this is just getting good

Flight of the Conchords but the guys are detained indefinitely in an ICE facility and come up with fanciful "songs" to escape the reality of their situation.

Theme: life is rebootiful

Sex and the City but they are all suffering from late stage syphilis.

Sons of Anarchy after the state of California imposes draconian emissions restrictions on motorcycles.

The Late Late Show With Tom Snyder but Tom Snyder is bleeding profusely from every orifice

sounds like Eric Andre is involved

Mary Tyler Moore works for InfoWars

Wasnt this what was happening anyway

That was the joke, yes

xp - June Cleaver was a nurse in the camp who dealt with "female issues" of the prisoners. Being a housewife is a big change for her. ... In season 2, Beaver learns that he was actually adopted due to his parents inability to conceive due to the effects of living and working in the V2 facility, and he speculates wildly as to who he really is. Was he Anna Unger's son with a prominent Nazi scientist? Was his father even higher up in the Nazi command? Was his father, in fact, Adolf Hitler himself?

Kids Incorporated only it’s set in a suburban basement and the kids are all undocumented and spend their time sewing fashion knockoffs for the people who own the house

Hill Street Blues but all the detectives have teamed up as a human centipede, starring Dennis Franz as Detective Andy Sipowicz/The Head and David Caruso as John Kelly "bringing up the rear"

Or even say, NYPD Blue

xxpost very week the songs they perform contain coded messages asking for home viewers to rescue them because the home owners are abusive

ok guys human centipede has been invoked, everybody out of the thread for a short decontamination

Sister Sister but every episode a tooth falls out of one twin’s mouth

Friends only it’s Rent

xpost the same twin's mouth every ep or does it alternate

was gonna say Dilbert but I forgot it already exists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flWuvkNWuS4

Eddie Haskell, Wally's best friend, is the bad influence he was in the original series. In this new version, Eddie is a motorcycle enthusiast and sometime drug mule for an older group of motorcycle enthusiasts who sell drugs and are affiliated with the KKK. Eddie learns who his buddy, Wally, really is, and wants to use Wally's real identity to impress his biker buddies and move up in their organization. Will Wally help his pal, or will he be loyal to his family and keep their secret.

Simpsons but Homer's obvious intellectual disability/substance problems/emotional inaccessibility are treated with appropriate care and sensitivity

Will June use her medical knowledge and prevent Eddie from further endangering her family?

Kojak, where now instead of constantly sucking on a lollipop he's always smelling his fingers. It's weird and it makes everyone uncomfortable.

Full House but it's the house from Hellraiser

I really think this Leave It To Beaver reboot has legs

Oh and then there's the storyline with Ward's secretary, Grace. Grace starts dating a nice man who works as an installer/repairman for the telephone company. He is black, but "one of the good ones" a phrase that keeps getting repeated throughout the office and then at home. Then Grace, the only daughter of strict (and also racist) Catholic parents, gets pregnant. It's definitely June to the rescue, but what will be the solution?

seinfeld but the entire series takes place after they go to prison

Use the entire cast of Oz

George has to bunk with Vern Schillinger

Kramer accidentally shanks Said and becomes head of the Muslims

Batman - Alfred kills Bruce’s parents so he can raise the boy as his own

The Apprentice

Breaking Bad but he's kind of terrible at science and dies.

murdered for being bad at science, you hate to see it.

The Apprentice

― John Wesley Glasscock (Hadrian VIII), Thursday, February 4, 2021 7:48 PM (five minutes ago

too soon

the only way I'm watching a reboot of the Apprentice is if it's the final scene of Goodfellas with Trump's face deepfaked onto Liotta's body

dr. katz, professional therapist, in which he gently and with a surfeit of dad-jokes pushes his celebrity clients towards suicide.

Bobs Burgers but Louise talks the other 2 into Menendezing Bob and Linda

the only way I'm watching a reboot of the Apprentice is if it's the final scene of Goodfellas with Trump's face deepfaked onto Liotta's body

sorry that's what makes it dark, it's just the same show as before, all is forgiven

feel like i'm zoolander to will's hansel in a walk-off. way to duplicate, then elaborate.

I think we just spent the past 4 years as extras in this reboot

that was just the spinoff

Teletubbies -- but they live underground because an asteroid hit the earth and it is actually a desolate wasteland. The only reliable source of protein are young animals and children which they lure in with their bright costumes and playful manner. Half of each episode is a cooking show.

lol

*a cooking show where the four Teletubbies compete to make the most delicious dish out of whatever protein source has ventured their way.

Making the Band - Diddy is unstable and kills a band member an episode, last person standing gets solo deal

we already have the Dark Teletubbies credits footage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98lOJGTe1M0

oh and each episode there is a celebrity judge

Shark Tank - billionaires travel to an island in the Caribbean where they feed a child to sharks

not if the Teletubbies get it first!!

Shart Tank - buncha people fed laxatives and forbidden from pooping, first who touches cloth loses

Real Sex - exactly the same but now you have to see all those suburban swingers in 4K

also there are three GAPING ANAL specials

rugrats except the characters are actual rats who live under your rug

Care Bears Today!: Now the only thing these Bears Care about is accruing Instagram followers. Just constant, affectless conversations about branding generating content as they putt about in their cloud car.

Scooby Doo - Scooby is a human in a polyamorous puppy-play BDSM relationship with everyone else in the van.

Name That Choon, it's Name That Tune but all the tunes have been replaced by choons

Loveboat but just mostly diarrhea instead of hooking up

Love In The Time Of Norovirus

instead of? these things aren't mutually exclusive

feel like i'm zoolander to will's hansel in a walk-off. way to duplicate, then elaborate.

Making the Band - Diddy is unstable and kills a band member an episode, last person standing gets solo deal

― he said that you son of a bitch (Neanderthal), Thursday, February 4, 2021 10:40 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

more like unmaking the band

mr rogers neighborhood has been gentrified to unaffordability, so presbyterian rev. fred rogers is now living in the church he used minister to and trying to find peace

ok no one’s going to like this but think Lolita except it’s BJ & the Bear.

Casper trying to solve his own brutal murder (which we see in copious and extremely graphic flashbacks)

otoh,, lipstick on a chimp= never not funny

(picnic, mauling)

Welcome Back, Kotter but the Sweat Hogs are all the children of millionaire gentrifiers.

JEOPARDY! but it's Trebek's corpse

wheel of fortune but they crush you under the wheel if you fail to solve the puzzle

Supermarket Sweep except there's no groceries and just apex predators

The Partridge Family but the kids are The Shaggs and Shirley Jones is Austin Wiggin. They are forced to be in a pop group. Locked in the garage to write and rehearse and made to perform in front of hostile audiences who ridicule them.

Valerie, only when the titular lead actress dies instead of introducing a new character and renaming the show The Hogan Family, the family begins to lure new women into the house and murder them for parts so the can create a new vessel that their matriarch's spirit can resurrect into

― Hello Nice FBI Lady (DJP)

^ winner

The Secret World Of Alex Mack, only instead of getting magical powers from the radioactive waste she gets very, very sick

Barney Miller, except the cops are popping pills or have other vices; the n-word and other racial epithets are freely used; and the press is hounding them about a detainee who claims to have been "Louima'd."

macgyver, serial killer

cereal killer. he creates weapons out of corn flakes

Gossip Girl except it's centered around an NXIVM-type cult rather than a school

Mr. Belvedere where he Munchausen-by-proxy-s a different family every season.

The Muppet Show where the cameras are all placed a few feet lower to show the human arms that have been jammed into the upper halves of savagely-bisected and freely-bleeding Muppet corpses.

Dexter's Laboratory, except Dexter is working with anthrax and WMDs.

Fraggle Rock except the rock is a crack rock which they smoke

seinfeld but the entire series takes place after they go to prison

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, February 4, 2021 7:41 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Use the entire cast of Oz

― Joe Biden Stan Account (milo z), Thursday, February 4, 2021 7:42 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Y'all never saw this? https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18kvo

Facts of Life except free bleeders

Gimme a Break! but now they're all compound fracture fetishists

Small Wonder, but Vicky vivisects everybody in her family and nobody ever discovers the bodies as she seals them in the wall and just tells investigators to "close their legs" when they ask what the smell is

Knight Rider except KITT is not just voiced but actually played by William Daniels, and every episode has Hasselhoff cruelly trying to ride him.

I would like a new version of Thomas The Tank Engine which focuses on how these sentient beings are brought into existence to perform menial labour and if they have any ideas about doing anything else they are bricked up in a shed and left to die.

Also they should look like this inside

https://i1.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/DD0woFSXoAAJqhS.jpg

speaking of William Daniels I caught Parallax View recently and was thinking someone could do a pretty decent update, but oriented around Qanon and the protagonist is very clearly having a psychotic break.

And then he or she also runs for the House and wins.

I'm not ok after that Thomas pic

The Clangers, except they're genetically-modified human colonists on a desperate mission to terraform a small planetoid, but now the biodomes are beginning to fail and they're considering whether to eat the Soup Dragon.

The A-Team where A stands for 'anus' because all of their specialized skills are performed with their anuses

i pity the fool who cant operate firearms with ass clenching

Powderpuff Girls escaped notice in this thread, emerges for the win! Also a reboot of "The 4400", which I remember having its moments, being like a combo of JMS' Rising Stars and later on, a mild Strikeforce Morituri with the "serum grants powers to X%, kills the others" plot.

Powerpuff. Apologies to their fans.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Weakness

lol someone redubbed MLP as a satanic cartoon not that long ago on Youtube

two and a half men but literal
rupaul drag race but where they have to lipsync for their lives

first one was a cutaway Family Guy joke

That Thomas pic is classic nightmare fuel

I had a Small Wonder one but I had to self-censor

The Smurfs are slowly disappearing and we eventually learn that it's because Papa Smurf is collaborating with Gargamel in exchange for blow.

the crown but with a laugh track

The Electric Company is reimagined as a black-ops squad using a kid's television show as their cover story. The first season blows their cover and they all have to go into hiding as an unknown organization hunts them down and picks them off one by one. Eventually, it's revealed that the organization hunting them is being run by Col. Fred Rogers.

I recently started The Crown and keep thinking that there are way too many missed opportunities for Elizabeth to send various people to the Tower of London for a fast execution.

Captain Kangaroo only it's a literal anthropomorphic, fascist Kangaroo who is a Captain in the military and seizes power through a military coup....in Canada.

the only people can than save Canada from teh Kangaroo....is the company that makes Canada Dry.

and also he's an ex-pimp

M.A.S.K. is now bondage hentai

The Gummi Bears who are actually weed dealers, they are called the Gummi Bears cos they deal in the sticky icky and they're all huge and bearded

The Wombles, except the "things that the everyday folks leave behind" they pick up are used condoms, faeces-stained tissues, needles, hurriedly-disposed of knives etc. Plus Madame Cholet stumbled upon a murder scene and had to go into a witness protection programme.

An adult animated Velma series is in development at HBO Max

It will be an origin story with Velma voiced by Mindy Kaling pic.twitter.com/Xn6NpWdhiE

— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) February 10, 2021

By adult I hope they mean it's like an animated Red Shoe Diaries

Live-action Powerpuff Girls series that sees the girls as adults who resent their crime-fighting childhoods, ordered by the CW. https://t.co/KRWKYb2RMq pic.twitter.com/V5mQurSqSj

— IGN (@IGN) February 9, 2021

lol

I mean...are dark n' gritty reboots just a secret ploy by pharmaceutical companies to increase usage of antidepressants?

The Good Place but Michael stays an evil torturer.

the Good Place but every character is a butt

The butt of an ex-pimp

Shark Tank but if enough panelists reject the pitch, the pitcher is thrown into a literal tank containing hungry sharks.

Three's Company but Jack is pimping Chrissy and Janet out of the apartment.

8 is Enough about a guy who kills 8 ppl

8 is Enough but it's a prequel to the Human Centipede

Kolchak the NIght Stalker an update. Could get pretty dark . Original series is quite fun so I'm surprised it hasn't been revisited yet.
Maybe that's not enough of a twist, I am just surprised nobody has done anything with it .
Is it well known?

Night Stalker was back in 2005 for 1 season w/ Stuart Townsend as Kolchak. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460665/. I watched it, and don't remember it.

Original series is great. The scene where he's sewing the zombie's lips shut and the zombie's eyes open is seared into my brain. Also, the pilot is fun, just to see '70s Seattle.

Kolchak the Night Peeper

How about an Inspector Gadget reboot that mostly just reuses the script for Robocop?

Q-nies: Goonies, but they're escaping from a global cabal of satanic pedophiles.

Boys' Town, dramatizing the process by which pedophile priests identify and groom vulnerable preteen and teen males.

My Name is Earl where he hunts down everybody who's ever done him wrong and tortures them

Boys' Town, dramatizing the process by which pedophile priests identify and groom vulnerable preteen and teen males.

― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Thursday, February 11, 2021 10:34 AM (seventeen minutes ago)

omg -- yeah -- finally some wheat among the chaff of irrelevant butts, pimps, and serial killers

I Love Everything but where people don’t actually love everything (and some are ex-pimps)

Bagpuss where a little girl keeps bringing broken trash home to her stuffed toy cat. & then he and the rest of her haunted toys devise interesting ways of torturing her with them. While singing twisted folk songs about the process in a style borrowed from Moondog.

The Wombles where a bunch of small cuddly carnivorous creatures pick up bits of rubbish that people have dumped i the green area they call home. they use them to build booby traps with to increase their diet.
PLenty of fun is had as the devise new ways of doing that and new recipes for cooking the results.

Hector's house. Hector is a veteran who has recovered from rabies just about. Zsa Zsa is a world wear cougar.
THey have a dungeon in the cellar where they spend time entertaining guests or entertaining themsleves with guests.
Unfortunately the secret is about to get out and that's where the story begins

Friends, only it's will they/won't they with Ross and Monica

jfc

Bagpuss where a little girl keeps bringing broken trash home to her stuffed toy cat. & then he and the rest of her haunted toys devise interesting ways of torturing her with them. While singing twisted folk songs about the process in a style borrowed from Moondog.

― Stevolende, Friday, 12 February 2021 14:41 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

was thinking more 'professor yaffle finds himself at the centre of a cancellation storm'

The IT Crowd only they're doing IT for the internet in Hell

'Friends" except it's Stockton, CA

Friends except it's set in Basra under siege.

Frasier, only Martin sexually abused Frasier and Niles when they were young and, now that he is older and infirm, the sons move him out of his house and into Frasier's penthouse so they can exact revenge upon him through ongoing, hidden torture that they pass off as a series of unfortunate accidents and misunderstandings to increasingly suspicious friends and coworkers.

World Series of Poker only instead of Poker it's ass eating

at least it's not the celebrity poker show with saddo Dave Foley

oh, but it is

House except every case involves genitals and anus. Mostly anus.

Look Who's Talking but it's an adult that can talk

It could be about a depressed adult suffering from ex child prodigy syndrome. He peaked as a talking baby, but now it's no longer impressive that he can talk and he never recaptured the high.

Look Who's On Horse

Punky Brewster, where now she's an actual punk rocker. Who solves crimes for some reason?

Was just walking by the television and saw an ad for an actual PB reboot. Sadly, no rock, no crime--just a standard-looking single-mom dramedy.

I just watched the trailer for this and I didn't think it would be possible to make Punky Brewster any more irritating and awful but apparently I was wrong

I'll only watch if they do an episode-length callback to the infamous cave episode of the original series.

A SpaceX rocket exploding isn't going to have the same emotional impact as Challenger.

A few weeks ago I actually hashed out a really elaborate Small Wonder reboot with a friend over messenger, fwiw. It centers on an adult Jamie Lawson, a stunted and underachieving man who is in therapy. For the first several episodes (perhaps more) there is no mention of Vicki whatsoever, and only gradually do you learn that Jamie's father (from whom Jamie is now estranged) dismantled Vicki after the end of the last season, and that Jamie has never really worked through his anger at his father.

Toward the end of the show, his father resurfaces -- he's now a former CIA agent gone rogue and underground, and he's been working on a top secret project, a Vicki 2.0, and it turns out he has cleverly hidden key blueprints in a microchip secretly implanted in Jamie's arm and is now ready to retrieve them so he can complete his superweapon.

This is only like 1/10 of what we came up with.

Leverage - but our lovable grifters don't right wrongs, they just rip off new people every week

How Everything Became a Gritty Reboot

And while we seem to be getting more gritty reboots than usual in the last decade or so — a decade that saw two films set in what might best be described as the Dark Snow Whiteverse — it’s not a new development.

A profoundly cursed sentence

Except Snow White was already pretty dark to begin with

she was pretty white iirc?

It all seems very fanfic-inspired to me. a kid's romanticized idea of what adult darkness is, superimposed on these "characters" who aren't characters.

yeah the snow white example is somewhat misguided considering that brothers grimm toned down the sexual content in the original fairy tales and amped up violence in some cases.

I will say that The Maltese Falcon (1941) is a gritty remake of Satan Met a Lady (1936). But yeah, the media is going to this well too often.

Gadget

a disgraced former police officer is given another chance after he gets his family murdered in a raid gone wrong. He is gravely wounded, and retrofitted into a cyborg. only Penny and Brain can assuage his deeply seated rage and desire for vengeance.

C.L.A.W. is a conglomerate ran by Jeff Bezos.

Which one of them has a junk habit, though

hallucinating a talking dog at all?

V, except the lizard-alien utopia is visited by other lizard aliens who are revealed to be human under their lizard-skin, bringing all manner of human racism. Also, everyone is on horse.

Survivor, except the producers use sleep deprivation, sound waves, CGI, practical effects, and actors to convince contestants they are on a supernatural island, like in Lost.

Oh, and hypnotism to convince everyone they crash-landed.

Cheers, except it's a seven season descent into alcoholism.

That Thing You Do!, except the band *doesn't* break up, but their third record undersells massively because of the advent of psychedelic rock.

As a result of a chance encounter with a member of The Grateful Dead at the Laurel Canyon store, singer James Maddingly Jr leads the band into a harrowing and torturous psychological downward spiral of beards, nirtous oxide, Manson, sitars, tie-dye, support slots with Vanilla Fudge and Allen Ginsberg.

24, except it's 24 hours in the life of a family and Dad just got laid off by Walmart and Mom has chronic illness. Will Dad start sex work to pay the rent that is due by midnight? Find out next week!

The Handmaid’s Tale except they are all literally handmaids who while away the hours doing embroidery and playing whist.

MST3K except, instead being subjected to terrible movies, the captives are forced to watch and comment on snuff films.

Dukes of Hazzard but with (more) racism, Q-Anon, and opioids. Will Cooter kill Uncle Jesse for his bathtub crank before Sheriff Coltrane seizes the farm in civil forfeiture?

The Cosby Show but it's a reality show.

The Pac-man: a mysterious drifter, haunted by his memories, prowls the city’s labyrinthine alleyways for pills. Stalked by the ghosts of his past, he finds he can only confront his demons when under the influence of a dangerous new street drug found only in the distant corners of the metropolis. Will his ghosts consume him, or will he survive long enough for the big score that will allow him to turn the tables on them?

M*A*S*H*: Set in a remote corner of the Korean War, the show centers on a mobile medical unit dealing with the tragedies of trauma of the war, complicated by a *serial killer* who keeps knocking off the doctors one by one. It's too dangerous to be rescued, so the the MASH unit must hold tight, hunker down and catch the killer before he - or she! - kills *them*. Stunt casting and twist: Alan Alda plays a famous visiting author doing research who fancies himself a detective and gets the investigation rolling, but he is found murdered at the end of the first episode! Thinking "The Thing" meets "Knives Out" meets "Dexter" (or anything else with a serial killer, I've never seen "Dexter").

Dexter’s Lab, starring Michael C. Hall

The Jetsons but in the singularity

blue planet - except it's a reality fishing show where fisherman, lead by the renown hunter, David attenborough, track and destroy endangered species

I really went all in on Leave it to Beaver upthread ... whoa

Ru Paul's drag race - cross dressers compete to build Mad Max style speedsters and race against each other, cross country

There was talk several years ago of a remake of The Thin Man, to feature Johnny Depp. (Fortunately, this seems to be dead.) The assumption was that this version would be truer to the novel than the 1934 version. And fidelity to Hammett's original could legitimately incorporate racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, and codependent relationships, among other "gritty" elements.

That said, I hope this pitch does NOT get resurrected.

I really went all in on Leave it to Beaver upthread ... whoa

― sarahell, Monday, March 15, 2021 3:12 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

except you kind of left us hanging re: june's past

Flog it - a group of charming con men visit towns, enticing pensioners to town halls with their family keepsakes, doors are locked and everyone is pistol whipped until they accept low ball offers for their heirlooms.

One Man And His Dog, where the herded sheep are slaughtered in unflinching detail and an AI recreation of Phil Drabble's head floats above the scene giving an amused commentary on the creatures' last moments.

xp - June was a medical assistant who dealt with pregnancies among the female inmate population at the camp! If a guard raped a prisoner and the prisoner got pregnant -- June dealt with it. Sometimes her work carried over to female staff who weren't inmates. If a senior Nazi official knocked up a clerk or secretary or scientist working on the rockets ... they called June.

I think Ward was just an accountant or financial analyst who got Paperclipped because he knew who was who and who got paid. June was actually the action-oriented one.

The Dick Van Dyke Show - the walnut episode was not a dream and the rest of the series involves Rob's ultimately futile attempt to restore humanity

"Highway to Heaven," where one of Satan's minions, in order to gain favor with his boss, travels through time and space to undo all the good deeds done by an Angel. Kind of like a reverse "Quantum Leap." Obviously it would be called "Highway to Hell."

this was kinda a major plot element of Supernatural tbh

Given the number of popular teensploitation shows out there right now, how about a prequel to Blossom that details her recovering addict brother Tony's four years of teenaged debauchery?

Looks like no one called dibs on Willy Wonka.

As every other property has been grittily rebooted...Hello Larry, in which Larry is a pill-popping right-wing shock jock, who may or may not believe the MAGA/QAnon talking points he regularly spouts.

Family Guy, only it's just home videos of people laughing at the jokes, and then it zooms out to people making fun of the people laughing at the jokes, and the people being laughed at are made aware live on camera that they're being laughed at, and told the people laughing at them are in the other room. and fights break out.

The Jeffersons, only it's Them

(with a laugh track)

Did u mean Us or are we talking George and Louise fighting off giant ants here, because I'm in either way

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them_(2021_TV_series)

https://www.slashfilm.com/netflix-picks-up-will-smith-movie-from-john-wick-and-atomic-blonde-director/

The Fresh Prince of Bel Air - someone murders Uncle Phil, his nephew has to travel across the country from Philly to avenge him

Dark Prince of Bel Air

The first teaser for the dramatic reimagining of ‘BEL-AIR’ has been released.

The series releases on Peacock in 2022. pic.twitter.com/YhWtLIq33P

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) November 23, 2021

If the entire series takes place underwater, I give the concept two enthusiastic thumbs up

I love the suggestion I saw someone make that the proper sequel would have starred Will Smith's spoiled California kids who are forced to go back to West Philly.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_450,pg_1,q_80,w_800/3bcfd579172c2f704be3a390394bc233.jpg

US homebuyers are increasingly turning to adjustable-rate mortgages as overall borrowing costs soar https://t.co/uZWS0kgoff

— Bloomberg (@business) May 11, 2022

You've Got Mail, except Meg Ryan doesn't own a folksy children's bookstore and is instead a tour manager for GG Allin

the dark origins of nermal as garfield's nemesis

lol milo

Garfield retold from Nermal's point of view is a genuinely good idea. Should be a graphic novel.

Frasier, only Martin sexually abused Frasier and Niles when they were young and, now that he is older and infirm, the sons move him out of his house and into Frasier's penthouse so they can exact revenge upon him through ongoing, hidden torture that they pass off as a series of unfortunate accidents and misunderstandings to increasingly suspicious friends and coworkers.

― Hello Nice FBI Lady (DJP), Friday, February 12, 2021 2:00 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOoqnhn_6I0

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that someone went there.

god i was worried there for a moment

Frozen 2, except Elsa doesn't save Anna in the first film and now she lives with that guilt along with discovering her parents died at sea looking for a cure for her.

Terminator 8, where instead of sending a Terminator back through time, the machines send a virus back through time and John Connor dies of Explosive Diarrhea syndrome,which causes diarrhea so severe that the patient literally combusts and catches flames.

The machines completely exterminate humanity but due to their machine learning and time spent emulating humans, they begin to squabble just like humans and then separate factions emerge and a machine Civil War occurs and

Oh wait this is just Battlestar Galactica I'm going back to bed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRNKt3rWKzY

^ Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

Just head this discussed on the What A Day podcast. Winnie The Pooh having slipped out of copyright now open to other treatment.
I assume Disney's interpretation has a different copyright

Dad's Army but it's winter 2022 and a bunch of senile old Tories are preparing to stem a Russian invasion amidst food shortages and fuel shortages

titled "Keep Calm and Come and See"

beautiful

> I assume Disney's interpretation has a different copyright

someone on twitter saying that disney still own the copyright on their version but as long as he's not wearing a red shirt you're good to go.

Small Wonder, still a shitty sitcom, but final episode, Vicki kills her host family

jesus I DID THIS ONE ALREADY A YEAR AGO

ok scratch that uhh...

umm....

Perfect Strangers but Balki isn't really Balki, he's a random, non-Meepos guy who murdered the real Balki so he can get closer to Cousin Larry and steal his identity and access the secret Appleton fortune, that even Larry knows not about.

50% of the show is footage from Step by Step

she was programmed to reward funny things and punish the unhumorous. by the end of the series, she had simply no choice

Growing Pains, featuring a grown-up Leo Dicaprio, and the entire series is Leo calling Mike Seaver and saying blasphemous things, until Kirk breaks the fourth wall and flips out and screams about how his Christmas movie was actually Citizen Kane.

oh, wait, dark gritty? hmm....uh - Boner is a hard-boiled detective and he spends the whole series solving the murder of a John Doe and the dead person turns out to be...him.

Antiques Roadshow, only it’s Friday the 13th: The Series

X-Files but now they follow QAnon

The Great British Bake-Off, where one contestant is killing the losing baker each week and incorporating their remains into their weekly showstopper challenge unbeknownst to the other contestants or the judges, but the production staff knows and is helping with the murders

Hereditary but gritty is in it

― Yelp for gyros (wins), Thursday, February 4, 2021 12:48 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Dark: the German Netflix series that's like an amalgamation of Twin Peaks, Back to the Future, and X-Files but gritty is in it

DJP’s contributions to this thread are killing me

SNL but they let the hosts freely spout anti-semitic tropes.

Arthur, a true crime miniseries where the adult animals put their heads together to solve the disappearance of Francine. Arthur is voiced by Richard Kind, Francine is found dismembered in a ritual killing, Binky is revealed in the penultimate episode to have been the cult-leader culprit. The "heart" of the series however revolves around the changing relationship between Arthur and his cop sister DW, who is attempting to assist in the investigation while covering up evidence of her own corruption and cartel ties.

ER, but each episode is from a new patient's pov as they show up to the ER, wait, then die.

Each episode ends with Clooney, drenched in blood, staring at the camera, intoning "We lost another one."

Scooby Doo, where Scooby isn't a dog, but a man seen together to look like one. Which is why he talks the way he does

Night Court: SVU

Which 1980s rapper is available to play the prosecutor

The Jetsons, in which George and family live in a cyberpunk dystopia, an environmentally degraded Earth inhabited by impoverished masses toiling for a ruling global elite that includes the Spacely family. The technology in the Jetson home is either surveillance equipment installed by the government or black-market, usually dangerous tech that Judy and Elroy have managed to scrounge from the vast waste dumps surrounding the now ironically-named Orbit City.

Xpost Kool Keith

Donkey Kong Country as a FromSoft/Soulslike open world

You know how on Scooby Doo, they always run away from the monster even if the monster turns out to be fake every single time? A 'year one' Scooby Doo prequel would be good. From the classic characters, it starts with just Shaggy and Scoob, along with maybe four or five others, who obviously won't make it to the end as the monsters actually catch them and show what happens when they do. Some monsters are real, but not all. Velma, Daphne and Freddie should eventually be introduced along with some friends or relatives who also get killed, so they are also properly traumatized and have good reason to be afraid in all the other series.

An A-Team reboot wherein people actually hit their targets in shootouts & with self-built tanks.

There's a Smurf story wherein Papa Smurf wants to organize the dance of the 100 Smurfs and is one Smurf short. It's solved in the story by Vanity Smurf accidentally cloning himself when his mirror is struck by lightning. But this story leads me to wonder if and how the Smurfs normally keep their population to exactly one hundred. These details need to be explored!

there is already a scooby doo film which is them becoming the scooby gang. not sure about all the deaths though.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1258157/?ref_=ttls_li_tt

Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (2009)

thankful it wasn't called Rise of the Scoobs or some shit like that

I'm pretty sure that dark, gritty comic book versions exist

There’s also real-life, in-continuity Smurf book Le Schtroumpfissime/King Smurf, where Brainy becomes a fascist dictator when Papa Smurf goes on holiday, and Jokey Smurf leads an insurgent bombing campaign

Then iirc Jokey Smurf gets sentenced to death

wow

The latest Scooby Doo series with Mindy Kaling as the eponymous "Velma" is a prequel where the characters are not yet a gang, popular girls at the school are graphically lobotmized, Velma suffers from anxiety attacks which manifest as insane visions, and Scooby isn't even in it. Neither is the Mystery Machine. It's not as bad as it sounds.

There’s also real-life, in-continuity Smurf book Le Schtroumpfissime/King Smurf, where Brainy becomes a fascist dictator when Papa Smurf goes on holiday, and Jokey Smurf leads an insurgent bombing campaign

You are describing the gritty reboot version of it, but you're close. Brainy becomes King Smurf in the cartoon, not in the book (which is called 'De Smurfführer' in Dutch!). Papa Smurf needs to go away to find a special herb for his experiments. The other Smurfs get into arguments and decide that they need someone in charge, however since everybody wants to be the one in charge they go for elections. One Smurf discovers that he can get his fellow Smurfs on his side by making them promises that greatly appeal to them - promises which he may not even intend to uphold. Brainy expects to be elected but only gets one accidental vote besides his own. Once elected, the King goes on a power trip, Hefty wants to beat him up but the King appoints him leader of the guard which facilitates his dictatorship. Jokey pulls his typical exploding package prank on the King and gets thrown in jail. A rebellion is formed and frees Jokey, Brainy is jailed instead and expects to be similarly rescued but nobody cares. The rebels retreat to the forest. Raids from the King fails. The King reinforces the village and the rebels attack it in an all-out civil war. Then Papa returns, everyone's ashamed, the King picks up a broom to start cleaning up the mess but the others tell him that they like him and the fault is not his, but everybody's, and everything's well again.

I repeatedly read all of the Peyo Smurf books to my daughter a couple of years ago so I'm well-versed. The above story is a very good one, but does seem to take forever. I prefer the one wherein they have a civil war because the north and south sides of the village have different takes on compound nouns, ie 'Corksmurf' versus 'Smurfscrew'.
The notorious first story, 'the Black Smurfs', features Smurfs getting stung by a certain mosquito and turning into zombie-like creatures. It's not bad but the chosen colour makes it somewhat problematic. For the cartoon version they understandably went with 'the Purple Smurfs'.
Far more problematic is the Smurfette story, which has Gargamel create Smurfette by infusing blue clay with a shitload of annoying personality features, and this is then the only female character. Ah, here it is: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/image/p/peyo/peyo_smurfin.jpg

Wow.. who hurt you bud?

Lol, thanks for correcting my precis. It's such a good book, and it really works on both levels -- as a colorful adventure for a six-year-old who likes Smurfs, and as a dark parable for adults (or teenagers who've read their first Orwell)

Brainy's misapprehension that he's going to be rescued by a grateful public is totally classic

Holy for shit, I forgot there was an A Team movie with Liam Neeson. Doubt it was dark and gritty, but I bet it was grim.

I quite liked that A-Team movie. It has an amazing over-the-top scene where they crash land a tank from a plane into a lake.
Parts of it work less well. There is a strong focus on the development of Faceman from an impulsive screwup to a controlled reliance and that means the ultimately, the main plan comes from him and not from Hannibal - who should really be the devious mastermind. Also, there's a whole thing about B.A. turning non-violent and then having a moment where he 'comes back' from that mindset in a very brutal manner. But overall, I would have liked to see more of this incarnation of the team.

But this story leads me to wonder if and how the Smurfs normally keep their population to exactly one hundred.

Soylent Blue

When Jay Leno was set on fire by one of his cars, I immediately thought of a Cars reboot set in a vintage car collection where the cars - tired, corroded with rust, and riddled with metal fatigue - see their owner as a demonic zombie master who totally against their wishes for eternal sleep, keeps them alive and running. Eventually, they turn on him.

a man, meek and down on his luck, is at the end of his rope. as he hitchhikes at one last ditch effort to start over again, he keels over in pain as he hears a ringing in his ear. it gives way to a piercing voice that speaks only one word at a time. "Hope". "Peace". "Salvation".

Soon, coordinates are beamed to his phone, and he goes on a long, arduous mission to meet the source of the voice in his head. he faces death many times, and by the end of the movie he reaches his destination. he finds a glowing light and as he draws near he falls to his knees upon what he sees:

Hologram George Burns. the film goes to black and the film's title appears for the first and only time

"Oh, God! Book One"

Andy Griffith - the last factory in Mayberry just shuttered, everyone in Mayberry is hooked on pills, Barney is a dirty cop who got kicked off the force in a big city.

lotr but its a kitchen sink epic ending in the senseless death of our antihero, an orc who never had a chance

andy serkis' ai gimp face plays everyone and peter jackson's nephew scripts

the youngest Tweenie, Jake -- Christlike and saintly in his virtue and patience, but sheltered -- attends his monastery with his visiting family. the oldest Tweenie, Bella -- kind-hearted but brash; often inconsiderate; drawn to vices -- is in a fiduciary dispute with the father of the Tweenies, the wretched avatar of the petit bourgeoi ands philandering sensualist prone to lashing out and wont to forget he has offspring in the first place. the intellectual atheist Tweenie, Fizz, enrages and confuses the monks via lengthy and deliberately contradictory monologues on the role of the state revealing a slight disdain for their traditions, but which in turn secretly reveals the deep internal conflict within Fizz, who finds herself unsure of her own identity, the unsolvable question of free will, and the forces to which she is beholden. the unsuspected, oft-forgot bastard child Milo waits in the wings. all of which is prefaced by an opening chapter noting that their father is most known for the grisly manner of his demise and the lengthy trial to determine its happenstance

xp - I've looked for something like that before, just like a Raymond Carver story about an alcoholic tavern keeper or Normal People coming of age thing but the background world is high fantasy.

An RPG that actually follows the life-cycle of a character, whereby your skills increase with experience but your stats decrease over time, and the last quarter of the game finds your character having to accomplish the final goals of the quest as an elderly invalid

Hip points

there's a lovely game called Zanki Zero that kind of does this