Refusing to stifle itself, Sony has announced that it’s working on TV miniseries remaking a number of classic Norman Lear TV shows, including The Jeffersons, Good Times, and All In The Family. The plans—which are unconnected to Netflix’s upcoming remake of Lear’s One Day At A Time—are still in “very early stages” according to Variety. “There is some talk about doing some of the original shows, redoing them with today’s stars,” Lear said. “There is a possibility that we’ll do All In The Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, Good Times.“
Rather than creating a new, modern version of “lovable bigot” Archie Bunker, though, the miniseries projects would basically just bring the old one back. (A prospect that would save us all the horrors of Archie talking up the prowess of his “dank meme magic” and labeling his son-in-law a “cuck”.) According to Lear, the plan would be to take original scripts from the shows and reshoot them with modern actors, then air the end result in six-episode blocks. Sony has suggested that the miniseries would be akin to re-staging a play, allowing modern audiences to benefit from All In The Family’s approach to (and, in some cases, codification of) a key transition in American popular culture, especially in light of recent events. “We’re exploring it,” Glenn Adilman, executive vice president of comedy development for Sony told Variety. “It’s sort of tricky to figure out what the business of that is and what that would be and how it would work. But its something we’re trying to figure out.”