TODAY'S HOLLYWOOD IS ANYTHING BUT DECADENT

It has become commonplace these days to denigrate Hollywood for its reliance on reboots, remakes, sequels and spinoffs. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has commented on this trend in his essays and in his book, The Decadent Society. “As a part-time movie critic,” he writes, “I can attest that…the economics of the business depend increasingly on the constant recycling of famous properties that originated as mass market entertainments between the 1930s and 1970s. Unoriginality is, of course, hardly new in Hollywood, but there has been a meaningful trend away from novelty and creativity over the last generation.”

Adam Mastroianni wrote an excellent essay for Substack called “Pop Culture Has Become An Oligopoly,” in which he noted that, “In every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market.” I’m sympathetic to this viewpoint, and I have written before about how much less heterogeneous current bestseller lists are than the bestseller lists of the 1960s and 1970s. But when it comes to contemporary television and film, I believe that people like Mastroianni and Douthat may be missing something. Mastroianni writes: “Thanks to cable and streaming, there's way more stuff on TV today than there was 50 years ago. So it would make sense if a few shows ruled the early decades of TV, and now new shows constantly displace each other at the top of the viewership charts. Instead, the opposite has happened. I pulled the top 30 most-viewed TV shows from 1950 to 2019 (source) and found that fewer and fewer franchises rule a larger and larger share of the airwaves. In fact, since 2000, about a third of the top 30 most-viewed shows are either spinoffs of other shows in the top 30 (e.g., CSI and CSI: Miami) or multiple broadcasts of the same show (e.g., American Idol on Monday and American Idol on Wednesday).”

To Mastroianni’s credit, he notes that, “I’m probably slightly undercounting multiplicities from earlier decades, where the connections between shows might be harder for a modern viewer like me to understand.”

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and I never tire of telling young whippersnappers how much better things were back in my youth than they are today. But even I have to concede that, for the most part, television today is simply magnitudes better than it was in my salad days. What’s more, the television of the 1960s and 70s (I’m too young to remember much of the TV of the 1950s) wasn’t really as original as writers like Douthat and Mastroianni seem to think.

Let’s take a look at some of the top-rated American TV programs of the 1974/75 season. The highest rated program, All In The Family, was an American remake of a British program called Till Death Do Us Part. The second highest rated program, Sanford and Son, was a remake of a British program called Steptoe and Son. At number three was Chico and the Man, which was inspired by a comedy bit performed by Cheech and Chong but also bore a strong resemblance to Sanford and Son (both are about the friction between a cranky old guy and a much hipper younger guy in a working-class milieu). In fourth place came The Jeffersons, a spinoff of All In The Family. In fifth place we have M*A*S*H, which was a spinoff of a Robert Altman film, which itself was based on a novel by Richard Hooker. In sixth place comes Rhoda, a spinoff of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. In seventh place is Good Times, a spinoff of Maude, which itself was a spinoff of All In The Family (which, of course, was based on a British series). In eighth place comes The Waltons, a spinoff of a 1963 film called Spencer’s Mountain, which was based on a 1961 novel by Earl Hamner, Jr. In ninth place comes the aforementioned Maude. Not until we come to the tenth highest rated program, Hawaii 5-0, do we arrive at a wholly original piece of intellectual property. But elsewhere in the top thirty, we find The Rockford Files, whose co-creator, Roy Huggins, described it as an update of the series Maverick, which also starred James Garner and was created by Huggins. We also find Little House on the Prairie, which was based on a series of novels. And we find Gunsmoke, which began life as a successful radio series.

Most of those series also appeared in the top thirty list of the 1975/76 season. They were joined by Rich Man, Poor Man, a miniseries which was based on a 1969 novel and would spawn a sequel of its own, Phyllis, which was a spinoff of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Six-Million Dollar Man, which was based on a Martin Caidin novel, The Bionic Woman, which was a spinoff of The Six-Million Dollar Man, Baretta, which was a reworking of a previous crime series called Toma, and The Incredible Hulk, which was based on a Marvel comic book series.

The next few years would bring us hit series such as Laverne & Shirley (a spinoff of Happy Days), Mork & Mindy (ditto), The Ropers (a spinoff of Three’s Company, which was a remake of the British program Man About The House), Alice (a sitcom based on Martin Scorcese’s 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More), The Dukes of Hazzard (a spinoff of the 1975 film Moonrunners), Lou Grant (a Mary Tyler Moore spinoff and, to my knowledge, the only example of an hour-long drama being spun off a thirty-minute sitcom), Flo (a spinoff of Alice), Archie Bunker’s Place (a re-working of All In The Family), House Calls (based on a 1978 film of the same name), Trapper John (a spinoff of M*A*S*H), and Benson (a spinoff of Soap).

Almost all of the abovementioned shows were official spinoffs of another intellectual property. Some, like The Rockford Files and The Dukes of Hazzard and The Waltons, were technically original material but based on earlier works from the same creator. But there was another, more insidious type of spinoff that was commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s – the outright rip-off. And the master of this was producer Glen A. Larson, whom Harlan Ellison once dubbed Glen A. Larceny, because so many of the series that he created and/or produced were clearly derived from somebody else’s work. Larson’s Alias Smith & Jones was clearly a rip-off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It Takes A Thief, which Larson produced, was a variation on the film To Catch a Thief; both were about suave thieves who generally operate in a romantic European milieu and are forced to use their skills to help out the police/government. Battlestar Galactica was a rip-off of Star Wars. BJ and the Bear was a mash-up of the films White Line Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, and Any Which Way But Loose (and inspired its own spinoff, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo). Switch was a mash-up of the film The Sting and The Rockford Files. The Fall Guy, which debuted in 1981, was probably at least partially inspired by the 1980 film The Stunt Man. Automan was a rip-off of the film Tron.

This type of pilfering was much more common back before nearly every film and book and TV series came to be viewed as potentially the seed of a brand new franchise. The makers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might have been annoyed by Alias Smith & Jones, but it’s not as if they themselves were making an aggressive effort to transform the film into a franchise (the film did get an official sequel in 1979, but it tanked at the box office). And even in those less litigious times, Larson was still subject to the occasional legal action. According to Wikipedia: “In his autobiography, The Garner Files, James Garner stated that Larson stole a number of plots of The Rockford Files (which Garner's production company co-produced), then used them for his own shows, simply changing the dialogue minimally and using different character names. Garner's group complained to the Writer's Guild; Larson was fined, and an episode of Larson's series Switch called ‘Death by Resurrection’ had the writing credits revised to give sole credit to the writers of the original Rockford Files episode ‘This Case Is Closed,’ as it was very clearly the basis of the Switch episode.”

Larson, a devout Mormon, was perhaps the most brazen intellectual-property thief of his era, but he was by no means the only one. Plenty of other TV programs of the era appear to have been inspired by earlier films. For instance, The City of Angels, a 1976 crime drama created by Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell, appears to have been at least partially inspired by the 1974 Roman Polanski film Chinatown. The TV programs McMillan and Wife and Hart to Hart were both unacknowledged updates of The Thin Man. Wikipedia claims that the late-1960s TV series Love on a Rooftop was based on Neil Simon’s stage play Barefoot in the Park, but Simon isn’t credited as a creator of the program. The sitcom Bewitched, which debuted in 1964, seems to have been a mash-up of the 1942 film I Married A Witch and the 1958 film Bell, Book, and Candle. Those two films were owned by Columbia Pictures, the parent company of Screen Gems, which produced Bewitched, so nobody bothered complaining about the similarities. The program I Dream of Jeannie, which debuted in 1965, seems to have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the very similar Bewitched. It too was produced by Screen Gems, so no one complained. The crime drama McCloud is an unacknowledged spinoff of the 1968 film Coogan’s Bluff, which starred Clint Eastwood and was directed by Don Siegel. It’s not really a rip-off, however, since Herman Miller, who co-wrote Coogan’s Bluff, also created McCloud, simply by reworking the material a bit.

To be a TV junkie in the 1960s and 70s was to live in a permanent state of déjà vu. Dusty’s Trail, a sitcom that aired in 1973 and 1974, was created by Sherwood Schwartz, who created Gilligan’s Island, and starred Bob Denver, the star of Gilligan’s Island. The series, about a group of pioneers who accidentally get separated from the wagon-train they are traveling in, was essentially a rip-off of Gilligan’s Island but set on the Oregon Trail rather on a desert isle. As Wikipedia notes, “Each of the seven main characters is derivative of those of Gilligan’s Island.” Technically, Dusty’s Trail is an original piece of IP. Ross Douthat or Adam Mastroianni, looking through a list of 1970s sitcoms, would probably consider it evidence of a less decadent era. But they would be wrong.

The Munsters, a sitcom featuring tropes from horror fiction but set in American suburbia, debuted on CBS on September 24, 1964, just six days after the debut of ABC-TV’s The Addams Family, a show with a nearly identical premise. But The Munsters was nonetheless a ripoff of the Addams Family. Allan Burns, co-creator of The Munsters, noted that, “We sort of stole the idea from Charles Addams and his New Yorker cartoons.” Marcus Welby M.D. was a program featuring a mature general practitioner (Robert Young), his handsome young associate physician (James Brolin), and their preternaturally efficient female office manager (Elena Verdugo). When it became a hit, the producers created a clone, Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, about a mature defense attorney (Arthur Hill) his handsome young associate (played variously by Reni Santoni, David Soul, and Lee Majors), and their preternaturally efficient female office manager (Joan Darling). One show was about medicine and the other about the law, but they both had the exact same vibe, and hit the exact same beats at the exact same time. The two shows even shared a couple of crossover episodes. Likewise, the program The Big Valley was basically just Bonanza with a female lead. And The Jetsons was just The Flintstones set in the future rather than the past.

When the ABC-TV series Batman became a hit back in the 1960s, it spawned a lot of rip-offs, including The Green Hornet, which was produced by the same people. In Batman’s wake, TV viewers got a bunch of half-hour sitcoms about ordinary guys whose alter egos were campy superheroes. These included the CBS program Mr. Terrific, and the NBC series Captain Nice. I doubt that Ross Douthat has ever heard of these short-lived duds. Technically, they were examples of original IP. But they were essentially just less-interesting versions of Batman. Likewise, the program Mr. Ed, though ostensibly based on a series of children’s books, was largely a rip-off of the Francis the Talking Mule films of the 1950s.

I would guess that at least two-thirds of the “original” TV shows in the 1960s and 70s were clear copies of some other IP. When The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour became a hit back in 1971, the networks started looking for other duos to pair in a variety hour program. Thus we got variety shows featuring The Captain and Tennille, Shields and Yarnell, Donnie and Marie, The Keane Brothers, The Hudson Brothers, and many others. And all of these shows were pretty much alike. The same guests seemed to cycle in and out of these programs on a regular basis.

When National Lampoon’s Animal House became a big hit at the box-office in 1978, every American commercial TV network rushed out a clone: ABC’s Delta House (an official spin-off of the film) was cancelled after producing thirteen episodes, NBC’s Brothers and Sisters was cancelled after producing twelve episodes, and CBS’s Co-Ed Fever was cancelled after producing six episodes (five of which were never aired).

And now let’s talk about script recycling, a subject Douthat and Mastroianni are probably too young to know much about. It was rampant back in the 1960s and 1970s, an era whose television programming Douthat seems to think was marked by greater originality and novelty than we see today. I was a television super-fan back in the 1970s. I corresponded with many of the most successful TV writers of the era including Alvin Sapinsley, Sterling Silliphant, and Roland Kibbee. I read the writing credits of every TV show I watched. I kept track of episode titles. And I frequently saw writers recycling virtually the same script over and over again for different TV series. The website TV Tropes has a thread dedicated to the topic of script recycling. This was a practice that was much easier to get away with back in the days before streaming services and DVDs made it possible to review TV episodes over and over again. According to TV Tropes, “24 scripts on Bewitched were recycled scene by scene. One was recycled twice. Most of these were episodes featuring the first Darrin [Dick York] that were recycled with The Other Darrin [Dick Sargent], while the others were black and white episodes remade in color. Since some were two-parters, this means that a total of 55 of the 254 episodes, 22 percent of the entire show, weren’t unique. In addition to these completely recycled scripts, there were also many that had similar premises but were different in the particulars, and many individual scenes and gags that were recycled in otherwise original episodes.” You couldn’t get away with that kind of self-cannibalization on a contemporary sitcom like Netflix’s Grace and Frankie because, once an episode has aired, it becomes permanently available for streaming. But if a TV viewer of the 1960s thought a season-three episode of Bewitched resembled an episode from season one, he’d have no way to verify this. Home video-recorders didn’t exist and streaming wasn’t an option.

Script recycling happened all the time. TV Tropes notes that scriptwriter Rick Husky’s script for the Charlie’s Angels episode “To Kill An Angel” was just a slight reworking of his script called “Cricket,” which was written for the earlier series The Mod Squad. For his later series, T.J. Hooker, Husky recycled scripts he had written years earlier for programs such as Dan August, The Mod Squad, The Rookies, and The Streets of San Francisco. The Columbo episode “Uneasy Lies the Crown” used essentially the same script as an episode of McMillan and Wife called “Affair of the Heart.” Hee Haw, a variety series with a down-home southern flavor, featured, according to TV Trope, “Almost 20 years of recycled scripts, and not just segments recurring, but their entire content repeated.” A script that writer Kenneth Johnson sold to The Six Million Dollar Man he later repurposed for The Incredible Hulk. Likewise, scripts that had been used on the Six Million Dollar Man were often tweaked just a little and then used on The Bionic Woman. Michael Landon recycled some of the scripts he wrote for Bonanza when he was writing, producing, and starring in Little House on the Prairie. Several episodes of Laverne & Shirley employed scripts written for earlier projects produced by showrunner Garry Marshall. A script that Jack Winter wrote for Marshall’s short-lived sitcom Hey, Landlord was reused on another short-lived sitcom called Getting Together, and then used a third time on Laverne & Shirley. Several episodes of the short-lived sitcom Bustin Loose, which starred Jimmie JJ Walker, were word-for-word reproductions of scripts used on Walker’s earlier and more successful series Good Times. In 1966, the series I Spy aired an episode called “Bet Me A Dollar.” Here’s how the Internet Movie Database describes the episode: “Scotty [Bill Cosby] sportingly bets Kelly [Robert Culp] a dollar that he is capable of tracking down his friend anywhere in Mexico within a week. But the hide n' seek game becomes desperately urgent after Scott learns Kelly has unknowingly been infected with anthrax that will kill him if not treated within 24 hours.” And here’s the IMDB’s description of “The Game,” an episode of Starsky and Hutch that aired in 1978: “Hutch [David Soul] bets that he can successfully elude Starsky [Paul Michael Glaser] for 48 hours. The game becomes deadly serious when Hutch discovers Starsky has unknowingly eaten soup contaminated with botulism.” The I Spy episode was written by David Friedkin and Morton Fine. The Starsky and Hutch episode was written by Tim Maschler. This kind of “imitation” occurred on a regular basis back in the day.

Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, a TV series developed by Glen A. Larson, employed a script, “Journey to Oasis,” that, according to TV Tropes, “was nearly identical to the original Star Trek episode ‘Journey to Babel.’ Actor Mark Lenard even appeared in both, playing very nearly the same character.”

Only a small handful of gifted film directors (Stephen Spielberg, for instance) cut their teeth directing TV shows in the 1960s and 1970s. Commercial television of that era was so formulaic that it was a poor proving ground for serious filmmakers. Robert Blake once referred to TV directors as “furniture.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Every single episode of Marcus Welby M.D. or Adam 12 looked exactly alike. There was no room for personal expression when directing network television back then. Most of the best directors of Spielberg’s generation went to film school and then worked their way up into the director’s chair after taking on lesser jobs in the industry. An astounding number of that generation’s best filmmakers spent at least part of their early career working for legendary schlockmeister Roger Corman. The list includes Coppola, Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, John Sayles, and many others. Other serious filmmakers of that generation – Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader, John Waters, John Carpenter, John Milius, etc. – managed to bypass television even without the aid of Corman’s mentorship. Nowadays, however, plenty of top-notch directors move back and forth between TV and film. Joss Whedon earned his bones directing TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (based on a film he wrote but didn’t direct), Angel, and Firefly. J.J. Abrams also directed a lot of TV episodes early in his career. Cary Joji Fukunaga often toggles back and forth between film and television projects. Justin Lin, who has directed installments of the Star Trek and the Fast and Furious film franchises, has also directed episodes of TV series such as Community, True Detective, and Magnum P.I. This is possible because today’s prestige TV is not only much better than any television shows of the 1970s, it is also better than much of the cinema of the 1970s. Mike White’s current MAX series, White Lotus, bears a superficial resemblance to Aaron Spelling’s 1970s hits The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. All of those series are about (mostly) rich white people vacationing in impossibly glamorous settings. But the similarities end there. White Lotus is a masterpiece of cinematography, social commentary, scriptwriting, acting, and more. The Love Boat and Fantasy Island (the latter was essentially a rip-off of the former) were lightweight dreck. Likewise, Apple-TV’s Severance bears a resemblance to the 1967 British TV series The Prisoner, but the production values on Severance, which costs a reported ten million dollars an episode, are beyond anything the producers of The Prisoner could have imagined. If NASA had improved as much as Hollywood has since the 1970s, we’d have colonized Mars by now. Decadence, indeed.

Douthat sees the proliferation of film and television franchises as evidence of American decay. But you could just as easily look at it as a sign of American improvement. After all, it’s not as if no one ever tried to create film franchises in the mid-twentieth century. It’s simply that, for the most part, they were very bad at doing so. Take a look at Jaws, for instance. It was the highest grossing film of 1975 and one of the most highly admired films of all time. Universal Pictures had no intention of letting the film be a standalone property. The studio quickly went to work on producing a sequel. Jaws 2 was released in 1978. Nowadays, the sequel to a monstrously successful film would likely be helmed by either the same director as the first film or by someone of equal stature. Universal Studios assigned Jaws 2 first to director John D. Hancock, a filmmaker of no particular stature, and then, after firing Hancock, to Jeannot Szwarc, a Paris-born journeyman best known for cranking out episodes of various TV series, including the aforementioned The Rockford Files, Baretta, and It Takes a Thief. This was typical of the careless way film franchises were handled back in the 1970s. Despite a troubled set (star Roy Scheider actually faked insanity in a failed effort to get out of appearing in the sequel), numerous cost overruns, and a lukewarm reaction from the critics, the film was a huge financial success, earning more than ten times its production budget of $20 million (the total budget, including advertising, was $30 million). Five years later, the studio went back to the well with Jaws 3D. This film was directed by Joe Alves, a production designer who had never before directed a film and would never direct another. Jaws 3D was a financial success, but it has an eleven percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. These days it’s regarded as sort of a camp classic (ironically, the film was originally conceived as a spoof of the first film and was going to be titled Jaws 3 Humans 0; Universal rejected this idea and tried to make a straight thriller, but it ended up being closer to a spoof than a thriller). Finally, in 1987, Universal went to the well one final time with Jaws: The Revenge, directed by Joseph Sargent, starring Michael Caine, and widely regarded as one of the worst big-budget films ever made. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of zero percent. Each new addition to the Jaws franchise was significantly worse than its predecessor, something you can’t say about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the Batman franchise, or many of the other successful franchises that have flourished in the twenty-first century. One of the reasons we’re seeing so many more franchises in the twenty-first century is because Hollywood has gotten so much better at fostering them.

Consider the film Grease, which was released in 1978 and starred John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. It became the highest-grossing film of all time within months of its debut (it no longer holds that record). It was a dead certainty that Paramount Pictures would be following it up with a sequel. The sequel arrived in 1982 and starred a then-unknown Michelle Pfeiffer. The first film grossed $366 million, which was roughly sixty times its modest production budget of $6 million. Grease 2 grossed $15 million on a production budget of $11 million. If you take into account the film’s advertising budget, the film probably came out as a financial loss for the studio. In any case, the sequel so diminished the value of the franchise that no additional installments have yet appeared (although one is rumored to be in pre-production).

Speaking of John Travolta, the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, in which he starred, was another monster success, grossing $237 million on a $3.5 million budget. It was the fourth highest grossing film of the year behind only Star Wars, Smokey and the Bandit, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Naturally, Paramount Pictures immediately set about planning a sequel. These days, the sequel to a film that successful would, as mentioned, be assigned either to the director of the first film or someone of equal or greater stature. Paramount handed the reins of Staying Alive to…Sylvester Stallone? That’s right. The sequel to one of the most successful musical films of its era was placed in the care of a guy whose previous directorial work included just two boxing films (Rocky II and Rocky III) and a wrestling film (Paradise Alley). Surprisingly, the film was a financial success. Unsurprisingly, it was an artistic failure, and has an approval rating of zero on Rotten Tomatoes. No additional films were ever added to the franchise.

1974’s Chinatown was one of the best films of its era. Screenwriter Robert Towne intended it as the first of a three-film series. Alas, director Roman Polanski fled the country a few years later after being arrested for sexually assaulting a minor. The first sequel, The Two Jakes, wasn’t released until 1990. Written by Towne, and directed by star Jack Nicholson, the lackluster film grossed $10 million on a budget of $25 million. Needless to say, the third film never got green-lighted.

Contra Douthat, I believe that Hollywood hasn’t gotten worse at finding original projects, it has simply gotten very good at following them up with successful sequels, spinoffs and reboots. Back in 1980, CBS produced a TV series, Beyond Westworld, based on Michael Crichton’s Westworld film of 1973. It was beyond awful and the network cancelled it after three episodes had been aired. In 2016, HBO began broadcasting another series based on Westworld. This program was a success and has been nominated for well over 100 entertainment-industry awards. Douthat looks at a TV series like Westworld and thinks, “Decadence!” I look at it and think, “Damn!” It had the most-watched first season of any HBO program in history.

It’s true that, back in the 1970s, film sequels were often looked upon as cheap knockoffs, something gifted screenwriters, directors, and actors tended to avoid. At the San Francisco Film Festival in 1975, Stephen Spielberg told the audience that “making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick.” Of course, Spielberg would go on to make a few sequels himself, including three to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and one to Jurassic Park. But even in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, plenty of film franchises hit the movie theaters, including such masterpieces as Francis Ford Coppolla’s The Godfather Trilogy. Other successful franchises included the James Bond films, the Planet of the Apes films, the Airport films, the Dirty Harry films, the Rocky films, the Superman films, the Pink Panther series, the Bad News Bears films, the Star Wars series, and the Star Trek series. The difference nowadays, is that many film franchises become more successful as they grow. In the 1970s, it was often a case of diminishing returns. Each film in the Jaws franchise made less money than the one that preceded it. The same is true of the four films in the Airport series, released between 1970 and 1979. The first film in the Bad News Bears franchised, released in 1976, made $42.3 million. The third film in the franchise, released in 1978, made $7.3 million. The first film in the Pink Panther franchise, released in 1963, grossed $10.9 million. The third film, released in 1968, grossed less than two million. The series was rebooted in 1975 with The Return of the Pink Panther, which grossed nearly $42 million. The Trail of the Pink Panther, released in 1982, earned less than $10 million. Compare that with the performance of the four-film Toy Story franchise. The first film made $373 million in worldwide grosses. The second film earned just under $500 million. The third film grossed one billion and sixty-six million dollars. The fourth film grossed one billion and seventy-three million dollars. Iron Man, the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise earned $585 million internationally. In 2021, Spider-Man: No Way Home, the twenty-seventh installment of the franchise, earned nearly $1.9 billion internationally. These are not anomalous results. Plenty of contemporary film franchises get more profitable with each new release. The first film in The Fast and the Furious franchise earned $207 million worldwide. The seventh film in the series earned $1.7 billion. The first film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings cycle earned $871 million internationally. Every subsequent film in the series earned more than that.

The reason that sequels and spinoffs are so prominent in the twenty-first century isn’t because Hollywood has run out of original ideas, it’s because Hollywood has gotten so much better at making film franchises. No sane person would argue that Godfather III, Jaws: The Revenge, Concorde…Airport ’79, or Battle for the Planet of the Apes was the best installment of its franchise. Plenty of people, on the other hand, will be willing to argue that 2017’s Logan, the tenth film in the X-Men film series, is the best of the bunch. Nowadays, each installment of a franchise tends to cost more to produce than the previous one. That’s because studios genuinely want to improve the product and keep the franchise viable. But that wasn’t always the case. The original (1968) version of Planet of the Apes cost $5.8 million to make. The sequel, 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes, cost $2.5 million. The third installment cost $2 million, the fourth and fifth installments each cost $1.7 million. Those numbers don’t reflect a studio eager to expand its fan base. They reflect a studio trying to squeeze money out of a dying franchise with as little effort and investment as possible. Put another way, they are a reflection of Hollywood decadence. Today’s franchises are anything but decadent. The best of them are growing in quality and box-office returns with each new installment of the franchise. That’s the opposite of decay.

What’s more, most of today’s legacy franchises bear only the vaguest resemblance to the intellectual properties of the 1960s and 70s that spawned them. With only one exception (the Jim Phelps character played by Jon Voight in the first film) Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film series doesn’t re-use any of the characters who appeared in Bruce Geller’s TV series of the same name, which ran from 1966-1973 (and Voight’s Phelps character, a traitor to his country, shares only a name with his TV counterpart, who was a patriot). None of the technical gadgetry used by Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his teammates even existed in the 1960s and 1970s. The original series employed an ensemble cast, and various episodes often showcased a different set of these characters, foregrounding some, sidelining others. Cruise’s series has some recurring secondary characters, but every film revolves around Ethan Hunt. The original series looked cheap and was shot almost exclusively on the Paramount Studios lot, with a few scenes filmed in other Los Angeles-area locations. The eight installments in Cruise’s series (one of which hasn’t been released yet) have cost a total of about $1.1 billion to produce and have been filmed all across the globe – Prague, Singapore, Dubai, Russia, etc. The original series ran for seven years and was directed mostly by a rotating series of undistinguished TV journeymen. Cruise’s series is approaching its 30^th anniversary and has been directed by the likes of Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird. Most of the cast members of the original series who lived long enough to see the first installment of Cruise’s series disliked it intensely and felt that it was a betrayal of the original. They had a point. The series barely acknowledges its roots. It is essentially an original piece of IP marketed under the name of an earlier piece of IP, probably as a sop to Baby Boomers. But it is also much more intelligent, better made, more thrilling, and in almost every respect an improvement on the original. Only someone who never watched the original could possibly think of Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series as an example of American decay.

I grew up watching endless reruns of the Batman TV series that ran on ABC from 1966-1968 and starred Adam West and Burt Ward. As much as I loved that series, I’ve got to admit that Tim Burton’s films Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) constituted a much more satisfying treatment of the same basic materials. And Christopher Nolan’s three-film Batman reboot which began in 2005 with Batman Begins, was even better than Burton’s. Furthermore, despite the fact that the pandemic depressed its box office returns, director Matt Reeves’s recent reboot of the series, The Batman, earned $770 million at the box office, and has an approval rating of 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Batman isn’t decaying. He’s getting better.

Despite what it may sound like, I loved many of the crappy old films and TV shows mentioned in this article. I was a big fan of Glen A. Larson. It Takes a Thief and Alias Smith and Jones were two of my favorite shows as a kid. Hell, I loved Jaws 3D and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. It brings me no pleasure to acknowledge it but the TV programs I grew up loving look like absolute crap in comparison with contemporary television shows. The same is true of many (but certainly not all) of the films I saw in theaters back in the 70s. I’m not saying that every contemporary remake is an improvement on the 1970s original. Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022) are clumsy pieces of junk that make Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of the former and John Guillermin’s 1978 version of the latter look like cinematic masterpieces in comparison. But the popular notion that TV and film have become much less original than they were fifty or sixty years ago is largely bunk. Much of the “original” programming of the 1960s and 70s was just recycled junk that didn’t acknowledge its source material. Cheap imitations were everywhere. Script recycling was commonplace. And spin-offs, remakes, and outright rip-offs made up probably seventy percent of the programming available in any given week. Nowadays, spin-offs, remakes, sequels, and reboots still constitute a great deal of what is available on TV or at the multiplex. But many, if not most, of these re-workings of old material are not simply cynical cash grabs intended to squeeze money out of an ancient piece of IP. HBO’s recent Perry Mason reboot, starring Matthew Rhys, looked nothing like the old CBS series starring Raymond Burr. And it questions society’s treatment of women, gays, and African-Americans in a way that the original series never dared. Likewise, A&E’s Bates Motel series, starring Vera Farmiga, feels nothing like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In Hitchcock’s version, Norman Bates’ mother is nothing but a corpse. In A&E’s version she is woman with agency and desires and not a little bit of influence over the lives of those around her (she may also be nuts, but that’s a topic for another essay). Properties like those seem to be genuinely striving to re-imagine a legacy franchise in a way that that says something important about the way we live now. And that strikes me as the very opposite of decay.

Douthat has argued that decadence has settled upon nearly every aspect of American life – government, academic institutions, religious institutions, the hard sciences, and popular culture. He’s correct about much of that, but he’s dead wrong about television, and at least partially wrong about film. If he spent even a week watching nothing but old 1970s television programs – Planet of the Apes (a dreadful 1974 series based on the film franchise), The New Perry Mason (a dreadful 1973 reboot of the earlier series, it was cancelled after fifteen episodes), The New Howdy Doody Show (an attempt to breathe new life into a program about a ventriloquist and his dummy which first went on the air in 1947), Gemini Man (American television’s third attempt to turn H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man into network gold; it vanished after eleven episodes), The New Archie and Sabrina Hour (the seventh effort by a production company called Filmation to build an animated TV series based on the Archie comic books, it was cancelled after thirteen episodes), Here Come The Brides (a spinoff of the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers without the music and dancing which made that film watchable), Operation Petticoat (a spinoff of a 1957 film which itself is only barely watchable), Logan’s Run (a spinoff of the film about a dystopian future society where no one is allowed to live beyond their thirtieth birthday; the program died before it’s second birthday), and so forth – he would know what TV decadence really looks like.