‘Reboot’ Review: Hulu’s Starry Meta Sitcom Revival is Crowd-Pleasing Comfort Food

A few minutes into Reboot, a self-important actor (Keegan-Michael Key) gets his hands on a script for a buzzy new comedy. “It is both the funniest thing you’ve ever read, and you won’t laugh once,” he gushes to his skeptical girlfriend. It’s a ridiculous line on its face, but it’s not an entirely unfair description of a certain type of acclaimed TV comedy: dark, unconventional and prestige-y, with jokes meant to bruise more than tickle.

Reboot is not that show. Reboot is a show that is going for actual, out-loud laughs and very often gets them — thanks to clever writing, a crackerjack cast and a cheerful willingness to go for the broad humor of, say, an avalanche of popcorn (albeit with a knowing wink). If it’s neither as cutting nor as heartwarming as it could be, that is, in a way, part of its charm. At its best, its light touch results in a crowd-pleaser that’s a hair more risqué than the classic sitcoms that creator Steve Levitan, whose credits stretch from Wings to Modern Family, has built his career on, but that delivers much of the same comforting pleasures.

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Finding and maintaining that balance does sometimes prove a challenge, however. Initially, Reboot appears to be leaning into the showbiz satire of it all. The series opens with Hannah (Rachel Bloom), a young writer fresh off a festival-circuit fave with an unprintable title, pitching Hulu on her big idea: reviving Step Right Up, a cheesy family sitcom from the ’90s, as a more serious, less wholesome version of itself. (It does strike me as slightly odd that Reboot is not technically about a reboot, considering how nitpicky studio PR can be about splitting hairs between reboots, remakes, “reimaginings,” revivals and sequels. But I suppose Revival would have suggested a zombie drama or something.)

After being assured that, yes, people “are still doing reboots” — as if anyone in Hollywood in 2022 would need to be told that — the exec gives her the green light. In short order, Hannah reunites the original gang, who amount to a collection of familiar Hollywood stereotypes. Besides Key’s character, the Yale School of Drama-educated Reed, there’s the slightly reformed trainwreck (Johnny Knoxville‘s Clay), the B-lister turned duchess (Judy Greer‘s Bree), the child actor who never grew up (Calum Worthy‘s Zack) and, eventually, the returning creator of the original Step Right Up (Paul Reiser‘s Gordon), whose tastes and methods run far more old-school than Hannah’s.

Conflict inevitably ensues, with fault lines going every which way — between the boomers and the zillenials in the writers room; between Bree and a younger actress (Alyah Chanelle Scott’s Timberly, fresh off a fictional reality show called Fuck Buddy Mountain) she sees as her rival; between Zack and an entire lot full of people who seem to have no interest in taking seriously the star of such tween-oriented straight-to-video non-hits as Admissions Impossible, 12 Angry Boys and The Hunchback of Notre Dame High.

In contrast, meanwhile, Reboot feels like the product of a well-oiled machine. Nearly all of its key players are TV veterans, and while it hardly comes as a surprise that, for instance, Reiser exudes effortless charm even when he’s offending an entire room full of 20-somethings hired by Hannah, or that Greer knows just how to punctuate an emotional outburst from Bree with an exaggerated facial expression, it’s no less entertaining to see Reboot bounce them off each other in various combinations over the season’s eight half-hour episodes.

Reboot‘s industry parody never comes close to the scathing wit of a Barry or a Bojack Horseman, nor is it trying to. It does get in a few good digs, as when an exec (Krista Marie Yu’s Elaine) cheerfully says she’s “new to humor” before revealing herself as Hulu’s vp of comedy, having fallen into the position practically by accident after a dizzying string of corporate mergers.

And the show’s scripts go heavy on the self-referentiality. When a writer scoffs that “in real life, people don’t just trip over things the exact moment you need them to,” you know that’s exactly what’s about to happen. But its barbs aren’t designed to draw blood so much as to nudge playfully at a knowing audience, like a saucy host at an awards ceremony.

As the season goes on, though, Reboot increasingly turns away from satire toward sentiment, rooted in repaired old bonds and unexpected new ones. The pivot doesn’t always work. The series’ tendency to embrace prickly personalities and contentious relationships while also tiptoeing around truly thorny territory means that its moments of hugging and learning can feel amusing in some instances and too pat in others. It’s one thing for two colleagues who’ve never really gotten along to resolve their differences by defacing Chuck Lorre’s Walk of Fame star; it’s another for a relationship rooted in trauma that goes back decades to mellow into warm respect after a few short episodes.

Without enough acid to balance out its sweetness, the show’s attempts at a deeper emotionality can tend toward blandness. It’s in such miscalculations that Reboot seems most unsure of itself — of how to balance jokiness with earnestness, of where to draw the line between comfort and complexity. The season ends on a surprisingly somber note that suggests it could dig deeper in future seasons, possibly at the expense of its own fizzy humor.

But the series is at its finest when it’s looking to honest-to-God laughter as its north star. Gordon, in a martini-soaked rant that doubles as a meta defense of the very work Reboot is engaged in, makes the case better than I could: “You could make millions of people laugh. And to put that out into the world, to bring people a little joy at the end of their shit day, fuck you for not appreciating that,” Gordon tells an abashed actor, who’d been clamoring for heavier material. “Because I swear to God, that is as good and honorable a thing as a man can do.”