"Mission Impossible. Though both series featured Peter Graves, the 80's revival was a pale
shell of the original."
The ABC late 1980s remake of the series wasn't even supposed to happen.
It was rushed into production by the network, using a mostly new cast but as many as possible of the original CBS scripts from the 1967-74 era that were around and not so Cold War-centric that they were hopelessly outdated, because several of the new ABC shows that were supposed to hit the air that fall were delayed by a Writers' Guild strike. Other than the name changes of most of the characters, they were exactly the same plots and exactly the same situations you'd seen before--that way they wouldn't have to do a rewrite and risk the results of a strikebreaking effort. (A couple of the shows that were supposed to go to air that fall either arrived on air a year late or never got into production at all because the strike was so prolonged.) The season itself didn't even start in earnest until Thanksgiving time and new episodes of returning shows didn't hit air until the holidays.
The Mission: Impossible revival didn't last long beyond the resumption of full production after the strike. It was never really intended to, and ratings weren't strong enough to recruit a writing team to keep it going.
Had the writers' strike lasted much longer, we'd have probably seen still more revivals of old adventure shows with new casts and all-too-familiar scripts and story lines. No comedy remakes were in the works because at least the networks understood that most sitcoms either tended to date badly as the years went along, or depend too much on the performing talents and comic timing of their original stars, many of whom were unavailable because they'd either passed away (Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason) or gone on to major motion picture careers (Tom Hanks, John Travolta, Robin Williams, Ron Howard, Henry Winkler).
