Popular TV Shows With the Multiple Revivals

TV revivals are not new at this point. Frankly, a classic show that remains in the past without some kind of legacyquel-style resurrection is far more of a novelty in this day and age. Nobody lets IP lie fallow for long anymore.

But it takes a really special IP — or at least a really valuable one — to get multiple revival spread out across the years and decades. Typically, a hit show gets one second chance at success. If that flops, that’s it. (At least until someone wants to make a movie version.) But the eight series below got chance after chance after chance. They’re a little like Jason Vorhees. People kill them over and over, but they always come back to life. (Speaking of which: Does Crystal Lake count as a revival of Friday the 13th: The Series?)

Beavis and Butt-Head
Revivals in 2011 and 2022

You have to admire the staying power of Beavis and Butt-Head, two emblematic ’90s slackers who have endured for more than 30 years. They’ve basically outlived the entire art form of music videos, which they used to spend half their show making fun of! To update the concept, the revivals sprinkled in YouTube videos for the boys to chuckle at, and the most recent relaunch also included episodes where Beavis and Butt-Head aged in real-time and are now old losers.

Beverly Hills, 90210
Revivals in 2008 and 2019

The ’90s teen drama that launched a million copycats also launched its own reboots once the nostalgia for all those pleated pants and big sideburns kicked in. 90210 2.0 mostly focused on the lives of new students attending the same Beverly Hills high school as the original, with occasional guest appearances from the old stars. Then most of the original cast reunited in 2019 for a far stranger revival called BH90210 in which the actors played themselves as they attempted to make their own revival of 90210. If nothing else, the BH90210 version of the classic opening credits will make you briefly feel like you’ve fallen into an alternate reality where the show never went off the air in the first place.

READ MORE: 10 Actors Who Hated the Endings of Their Own TV Shows

The Carol Burnett Show
Revivals in 1979 and 1991

Sketch comedy series are relatively easy to revive. There’s no need to explain what everyone’s been doing for the last couple years; just reunite the cast and get ’em making jokes again. Carol Burnett did that a few times after The Carol Burnett Show first left the air in the spring of 1978. By the following summer, she’d already brought back her co-stars for Carol Burnett & Company. Then in 1991, she did it again for another handful of episodes.

Futurama
Revivals in 2006, 2009, and 2023

Futurama may be an unkillable show. Fox originally produced four seasons worth of adventures about the Planet Express crew, but every time the series comes to an end, someone else decides to bring it back. First Comedy Central revived it as a series of films that were chopped up into 22-minute chunks for syndication. That led to a full-fledged revival in the early 2010s. Then a decade later, Hulu brought Futurama back again, with new episode airing as recently as the fall of 2026. To date, Futurama’s creators have thought their show was on its last legs so many times they have now made (and aired!) four different episodes that were intended as series finales.

Gilligan’s Island
Revivals in 1974, 1978, and 1983

Three seasons stranded on a deserted beach would seem like all Gilligan’s Island’s premise could sustain, right? Wrong! As the show remained a perennial favorite in syndication, Gilligan (and the Skipper, too) sparked one revival after another. First the cast (minus Tina Louise and Dawn Wells) voiced an animation continuation, The New Adventures of Gilligan. Later in the 1970s, they began appearing in a series of live-action TV films where they would be rescued and restranded on the island in increasingly ludicrous scenarios. (One movie was literally titled The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.) Finally, the cast did another animated revival, this one set in space (!) and titled Gilligan’s Planet. That’s right; the castaways escape the island by building a rocket ship, but then they get stranded on an alien world. Womp womp! It’s just too bad the Harlem Globetrotters weren’t around to help out.

Masters of the Universe
Revivals in 1990, 2002, and 2021

Wherever there is injustice to fight and/or action figures to sell, He-Man will be there! The first Masters of the Universe craze may have died out by the late 1980s, but hope springs eternal for big Mattel profits and so the new He-Man series just keep coming, with reboots or sequels to the ’80s series debuting in 1990, 2002, and just a few years ago on Netflix, with a pair of shows overseen by Kevin Smith.

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
Revivals in 1972, 1976, 1979, 1988, 2002, 2010, 2015, 2019, and 2023

Do not ask me why, but audiences can’t get enough of Scooby-Doo. Although his initial cartoon series only lasted for three seasons, he hasn’t gone more than a few years in the decades since where he hasn’t come back to TV with a new equally dopey variation; new sidekicks, an all-kid version, an adult animated series, and so on. Give it a rest, Scoob.

The Twilight Zone
Revivals in 1985, 2002, 2019

Does The Twilight Zone remain one of the biggest names in TV history because it’s been rebooted so many times — with four distinct iterations to date — or do people keep trying to reboot it because it remains one of the biggest names in TV history? Either way, none of the three different attempts to modernize The Twilight Zone (once in the ’80s, once in the early 2000s, and once in the late 2010s by Jordan Peele) has made anything close to the impact of Rod Serling’s version. Why does the vintage show hold up so well and remain so potent in the minds of fans? That’s a question that can only be answered ... in the Twilight Zone.

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