During the pandemic, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos increased his personal wealth by over $1 trillion, Taylor Swift released two of the most lauded albums of her career and I... rewatched Buffy The Vampire Slayer for a sixth time. Unusually for lockdown, I’m not alone. In a period when most people’s lives have become mandatorily boring and repetitive, it seems many of us are embracing Groundhog Day on screen as well as off. ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ according to Ecclesiastes 1:9 – but it could just as easily have been me, browsing my ‘recently watched’ tab.
From Sex And The City to The OC, bingeing nostalgic shows from the ’90s and noughties has become the new baking banana bread, feigning death to avoid Zoom quizzes or arguing with your uncle about why wearing a mask to Sainsbury’s isn’t actually a violation of his human rights.
And if you thought that the impending end of restrictions meant saying goodbye to this nostalgia TV revival, you underestimated the public appetite for maxiskirts and problematic casting choices. Last week, it was reported that Ally McBeal could be returning to screens 20 years after it ended, while Gossip Girl and Sex And The City reboots are also on the way.
It’s perhaps counterintuitive that during a period when we’ve been starved of novelty, many of us are choosing to re-watch episodes of Dawson’s Creek or Gilmore Girls. But there’s comfort in revisiting old favourites. Having been socially isolated for much of the last 12 months, familiar characters have acted as proxies for our actual friends. And in an era when nothing feels certain, it’s calming to know that Buffy will always save the world, Dawson will always use 12 words when one would’ve done and Carrie will always be a (lovable) sociopath.
We’re also finding new ways of engaging with our old favourites. During my teens, my love of The OC stretched to watching every episode and reading some very non-PG fan fiction about Ryan and Seth. These days, I can listen to Welcome To The OC, Bitches! – the forthcoming podcast from Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke (aka Summer Roberts and Julie Cooper). Similarly, authors Caroline O’Donoghue and Dolly Alderton spent their second lockdown re-watching Sex And The City and re-examining ‘big thesis topics’, such as the absence of strap-ons and Big’s weekend shirt collection, on their podcast, Sentimental In The City.
With the much deferred Friends reunion special said to finally be filming later this month, it’s clear we were wrong to assume the ’90s were over. Turns out they were On A Break.