The Most Expensive TV Series Reboots

These days, high-profile TV shows are more and more like movies that air each week, complete with big-screen production values. It can cost a lot of money to make a good series, what with all the set construction, costumes, special effects, actor salaries, and other major expenses. That's to say nothing of the millions that networks, cable channels, and streaming services spend to market and promote their shows — they've got to do a lot (and part with a lot of dough) to differentiate their products from the competition.

One other way networks and services can get an upper hand: bring back shows the public already knows about and loves. Reviving an old show is a relatively safe investment, because it's easier to attract viewers to a known entity than it is a brand-new one. On the other hand, reboots can be costly — it's not cheap to get popular and busy actors back to the project that made them famous. For that reason and others, reboots can wind up with huge price tags. Here are the most expensive blasts from the past to hit TV in the last few years.

Will & Grace was the last vestige of NBC's "Must See TV," the network's final multi-camera, heavily-watched sitcom of its Thursday-night glory days of the late '90s and early 2000s. The studio-shot zany friendship comedy looks quaint by today's standards, but it was revolutionary during its 1998 to 2006 run, as it was among the first to feature multiple gay characters. Not only did viewers flock to it — it finished at #9 in the Nielsen ratings for the 2001-2002 season — but it won all kinds of Emmys, too, including Outstanding Comedy Series and at least one each for all four main cast members — Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Sean Hayes, and Megan Mullally.

In the summer of 2016, the cast and creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan reunited to make a Will & Grace internet video about the upcoming election. They had such a good time — and the clip garnered so much attention — that NBC happily ordered a revival. And during the middle of that first reboot season, the network went ahead and green-lit a second and third season. Will & Grace 2.0 wasn't exactly a mega-hit, ranking #36 in total viewers for its first run of episodes, and #72 for its second. That's not a very good return on NBC's investment — the network had to pay a licensing fee of $2 million per episode. That's not even counting the initial salaries of $250,000 per episode for each of its four stars.

Putting the "comic" in comics since the 1980s, The Tick is probably the silliest superhero property of all time. Originating as a black-and-white indie title by Ben Edlund, it's about a gigantic, gregarious, "night-invincible" superhero in a blue suit who is sworn to protect "The City" against over-the-top super villains with the assistance of his best pal Arthur. The Tick has been adapted for television three times — as an animated series on Fox Saturday mornings in the '90s, a short-lived live-action version starring Patrick Warburton in 2001, and in 2017 by Amazon for its Prime Video service. 

This time, British comedian and actor Peter Serafinowicz took the lead as the Tick with Griffin Newman as the unsteady Arthur. Amazon streamed two seasons of the highly cinematic, serialized take on The Tick before cancelling it. As the show was critically acclaimed and Amazon doesn't release viewership numbers, we can only assume its cancellation came down to money. Indeed, the half-hour series cost a whopping $5 million per episode in production costs.

Deadwood is among the most acclaimed shows to ever air on HBO, which is saying something of a network that also gave the world The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Chernobyl, and Succession. The slow-burn, based-on-real-life saga of the 1890s gold boom Dakota Territory settlement of Deadwood was an ultra-realistic and exceedingly grim reimagining of the Western, with conflicted good-guy sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) pitted against conniving bar-and-brothel proprietor Al Swearengen (Ian McShane). Despite acclaim and 28 Emmy Nominations (including eight wins), the show was abruptly canceled after its third season in 2006... with several unresolved plot lines left hanging. 

Corporate squabbles between HBO's corporate parent and Deadwood's production companies were responsible, but talk of a reboot or revival to wrap up the show's storylines started almost immediately. Finally, in 2018 — 12 years after canceling it — HBO gave the go-ahead to a one-off Deadwood movie. It wasn't cheap or easy to reassemble the show's huge original cast for Deadwood: The Movie, nor to re-create the re-creation of 19th century Deadwood. By the time the film aired in May 2019, it had cost producers nearly $21 million, or around double the expenditures of a couple of episodes of the average prestige cable drama.

Star Trek isn't the only low-budget 1960s science-fiction television series that Hollywood can turn to when it needs to wring new life out of an old franchise — Lost in Space comes back into orbit every now and then, too. The futuristic take on The Swiss Family Robinson finds the Robinson family in the futuristic, far-off year of 1997, knocked off course on their mission to travel to a space colony and finding their way back. Its most famous contribution to the culture: the Robinsons' robot, which loved to warn of "Danger!" 

In 1998, Hollywood turned Lost in Space into an $80 million sci-fi epic starring William Hurt, Gary Oldman, and Heather Graham. It grossed a so-so $69 million in North America, but in 2018, Netflix figured enough time had passed to get Lost again. It's a much darker but well-produced take on Lost in Space, and features a cast of well-known actors, including Molly Parker (Deadwood) and indie movie icon Parker Posey. Making a show set in space that looks good and is stocked with name talent isn't inexpensive. The average episode of the Netflix show costs more than $7 million to produce.