In recent years there has been a trend of beloved TV Shows coming back and finding new life with continued stories. Girl Meets World, Fuller House, Dallas, and The Gilmore Girls come to mind, not to mention the forthcoming Will & Grace revival and the Netflix reworking of One Day at a Time. Audiences are clearly enjoying revisiting these old favorites and it got me thinking: what other shows would we love to see come back. Today's article explores some titles we'd all flock to our televisions to watch again.

The Facts of Life
The final episodes of the hit sitcom The Facts of Life hinted at Blair Warner (Lisa Welchel) taking over the Eastland School for Girls and transitioning it into a co-ed institution. It felt as if the show was going to spin-off into a whole new generation of adolescents needing guidance. How about revisiting Eastland and have some of the old characters pop-in now and again (or having one or two work there) while we get to know a whole new batch of students? 

Family Ties
The Keaton Family was one of the most-beloved families to ever grace a sitcom. The liberal ex-hippie parents Elise and Stephen (Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross) and particularly their ultra-conservative son Alex (Michael J. Fox) made for great comedy and touching family moments. Wouldn't it be fascinating to see how they square off in Trump America? As grandparents would the Keaton parents have evolved in a more conservative direction or would their liberal roots fire them up for a new generation of protest? Would Alex find himself at odds with his politics? Better yet, would Alex have an ultra-liberal child who rails against his conservatism?

Picket Fences
Was there ever a more special television program than Picket Fences? In the small town of Rome, Wisconsin, the most peculiar things would happen thanks mostly to its quirky citizens. Centering around Sheriff Jimmy Brock (Tom Skerrit) and doctor wife Jill (Kathy Baker), the show was equal parts pathos and humor. With a cast of delightfully unique character actors playing the town folk (including Fyvush Finkel, Ray Walston, Zelda Rubinstein, and Adam Wylie), Picket Fences was a clever exploration of what happens when the absurd creeps into everyday life. Never have I so badly wanted to return to TV town (Okay, Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls aside) and I think we would welcome another chance to embrace the bizarre therein.

Cheers
The Boston bar became a place for all of us to go on Thursday nights and have a half-hour of laughs with some of our favorite n'er-do-wells. From Sam Malone (Ted Danson) the recovering alcoholic proprietor who had once played pro ball, to the bar stool mainstay Norm (George Wendt) who constantly complained about his unseen wife Vera, we fell in love with these characters. We can probably imagine they are all still there, drinking their woes away. Let's revisit this happy haunt and buy them a beer. 

Married… with Children
Al Bundy and his wife Peg were the worst parents on television, and their bimbo daughter and horny son were always a reminder that procreation is not a requirement. Married… with Children was raunchy, raucous, hilarious, and cutting edge in its day. No subject, insult, or politically incorrect storyline was taboo, and even though it offended scads of viewers, it lasted for an impressive eleven seasons and was the Fox Network’s maiden voyage into producing original television programming for primetime. The premise was simple: a shoe salesman’s life falls apart at every turn, and going home to his sex-crazed, lazy wife and his two miscreant children made us laugh…a lot! We could sure use some Bundy humor again.

Friends
Admittedly, this is not a show that I would personally like to see make a comeback, but when I started writing this piece, many of my friends chimed in and said, “You have to include Friends”. So, here it is. For many, the lives of Monica, Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe became an ingrained part of their television-viewing world. Watching these twenty-somethings age into thirty-somethings made audiences laugh and become invested their predicaments. Jumping ahead a decade-and-a-half, it might be fun to see if they’ve worked some of their problems out and investigate if they remain the inseparable posse of chums that originally endeared them to us. It would also be interesting to see if any of them can afford that spacious Manhattan apartment with a balcony near Central Park that they inexplicably managed on middle class incomes.

Roseanne
Roseanne Connor (Roseanne Barr) and her brood were a staple of 90s television. Blue collar, working class, facing poverty and an ever-changing America, there was something familiar and relatable about this family who were struggling with the same everyday problems we were all juggling. The final season left us disappointed, with the revelation that the story we had watched all those years had been altered as part of the title character's book she was writing. We'd love some more chapters of the fictional account, where Dan survives his heart attack and the family remains their wonderfully dysfunctional selves. 

Seinfeld
For a TV show that was supposedly about nothing (this was an ongoing conceit of the program), Seinfeld certainly resonated with an entire generation of TV watchers. Stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld (basically playing himself), surrounded himself with three lovable losers: the excitable George (Jason Alexander), the sour-dispositioned snob Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and the hot-mess with boundary issues Kramer (Michael Richards) gave us one memorable comedy of errors after another. When we last left this quartet, they were sitting in prison for failure to observe a Good Samaritan law. Isn't it time to see what became of them after serving their (well-deserved) sentence? Despicable as they were, let's admit how fascinated we would be with a Seinfeld renaissance.

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