Netflix picks up Good Times cartoon from Norman Lear, Steph Curry, and… Seth MacFarlane
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Every old thing must someday be repurposed into a new thing, and now the eternal much of progress has come for the classic sitcom Good Times. According to Variety, original executive producer Norman Lear is teaming up with Netflix for an animated reboot of the series with Steph Curry and Seth MacFarlane on board as producers. (MacFarlane presumably has some kind of overall monopoly on animated sitcoms, so Lear and Netflix had to go through him or risk being the subject of some withering monologue from Brian on Family Guy.)
The official premise for the show is that it will follow “the Evans family as they navigate today’s world and contemporary social issues” while “[reminding] us that with the love of our family, we can keep our heads above water.” That seems to imply that it will be the same basic show but set in the present day, which seems like the most obvious route for this kind of sitcom revival, and Variety says it will be created and showrun by The Boondocks’ and Black Dynamite’ Carl Jones. In a statement, he said that this new take will be “animated and a little edgier,” adding that “the struggle has just gotten strugglier.”
The general idea for this is at least partially inspired by two things: The live Good Times thing on ABC a few months ago and the COVID-necessitated animated episode of Lear’s other sitcom revival, One Day At A Time. Clearly there’s some demand for both Good Times and animated sitcoms that used to be live-action sitcoms, so this seems like a natural progression.
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Sitcoms are animated and superheroes are live-action. I feel like I’m in Bizarro world.
I’d rather have a Good Time cartoon.
So… conflicted…I’m not a fan of the majority of McFarlane’s work. Family Guy, American Dad? Leave me cold. No thank you.But…I kinda liked “Orville”. I outright laughed at the insanely anachronistic dumb humor of “Million Ways to Die in the West”.I don’t know his creative process at all, he may have a co-writer or friend / loved one / overly assertive editor reworking his material on the stuff I can stomach, it may be him. He may not even be in a truly creative position on the show, a name on the masthead to get network credibility. The showrunner in particular gives me hope he’ll be relatively uninvolved or at least filtered through a few layers.It gives me *just* enough space where I’m willing to give it a chance, I’m just not willing to sign off on it as something I’m even willing to commit to a full episode until I see which “Seth” we get, or if his particular style is even present.
Seth also got Fox to reboot Cosmos.
I would not be shocked to find out that like cosmos, this was a beloved show from his youth. He seems to enjoy using his clout to get classics from his youth rebooted (and I cant blame him, if you have the power go for it) but I dont think he does much more than produce
I dislike Family Guy and most of Seth McFarlane’s humor and cartoon style but the work he he has done an amazing job of boosting deserving creators and using his influence to get things like Cosmos made. And it seems like all of his costars enjoy working with him.
This is an odd choice given how many Black Americans, including some of the casts, found the original to be very offensive. The Black Panthers even confronted Lear in his office leading to the creation of “The Jeffersons” which had a much more defiant tone and was so widely beloved by the Black community that the casts regrouped to perform the original scripts live on stage with great success. As of even a few years ago Lear still didn’t understand the animosity. On the other hand, it seems right up MacFarlane’s infantile alley…
I understand the appeal of this concept from both the studios’ perspective and that of someone like McFarlane who wants to reboot his old childhood favorites, but the world does not need this. The world needs Chauncey Roosevelt and his family from “F Is For Family” to get their own spinoff animated show instead. The “R is for Rosie” episode of FifF was excellent and would be such a good honest take on 70’s black America compared to whatever this will wind up being.