This special issue examines contemporary American TV series revivals with a focus on production and reception contexts as well as the industrial, cultural, and textual practices involved. Each essay is concerned with a different case study and brings a distinct approach to the analysis of the trend on American network television and the online streaming service Netflix. Together, they analyze how revivals rely on past TV experiences to circulate new products through the crowded contemporary media landscape, and how they seek to negotiate the televisual heritage of original series, feelings of generational belonging, as well as notions of the past, present, and future in meaningful ways. This introduction to the special issue provides the definitions, broader historical context, and theoretical framework of televisual repetition and innovation for understanding contemporary TV series revivals.

This essay examines digital de‐aging—a process of making actors appear younger on‐screen than they actually are that has taken a firm hold in contemporary Hollywood cinema—as a controversial filmmaking tool that raises fundamental questions about cinematic realism in the digital age. Since Hollywood’s visual effects are similar to the image manipulation that can be achieved with deepfake software, digital de‐aging is framed as a complex creative process that supports the actors’ craft in order to distinguish it from the image manipulation and misinformation that has come to characterize the post‐truth era. I will discuss the affordances and limitations of Hollywood’s “youthification” technology in terms of the shifting ontologies that characterize the transition from the photographic to the digital image, situate digital de‐aging within larger debates about synthespians and the realistic portrayal of digitally created human beings, and argue that de‐aging in films such as Gemini Man (Ang Lee, 2019) and The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) reconfigures linear temporalities and ultimately reshapes the concepts of time and memory by which we structure our life trajectories.

Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), based on a novel by Jack Finney, has become one of the most influential alien invasion films of all time. The film's theme of alien paranoia-the fear that some invisible invaders could replace individual human beings and turn them into a collective of emotionless pod people-resonated with widespread anxieties in 1950s American culture. It has been read as an allegory of the communist threat during the Cold War but also as a commentary on McCarthyism, the alienating effects of capitalism, conformism, postwar radiation anxiety, the return of "brainwashed" soldiers from the Korean War, and masculine fears of "the potential social, political, and personal disenfranchisement of postwar America's hegemonic white patriarchy" (Mann 49). 1 Engaging with the profound concerns of its time, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is widely regarded as a signature film of the 1950s. Yet despite its cultural and historical specificity, the narrative of alien-induced dehumanization has lent itself to reinterpretations and re-imaginations like few others, always shifting with the zeitgeist and replacing former cultural anxieties with more contemporary and urgent ones. Siegel's film has inspired three cinematic remakes over the last 55 years: Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers (1993), and, most recently, Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007. Bits and pieces of the film have also found their way into the American popular imagination, taking the form of intermedial references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers in movies, television series, cartoons, and video games. 2 By remodeling the theme, plot, characters, narrative devices, visuals, sound, and special effects of Siegel's film in 6

This chapter examines the ‘nostalgia’ reboot, a serial form that restarts a franchise at the same time that it preserves and celebrates its past. It identifies films like The Force Awakens and Creed as new films in these nostalgia franchises, but specifically investigates the case of Jurassic World, a film that summons its (pre-historic) past and employs nostalgia as its method of renewal. Describing the nostalgia reboot as evidence of a type of Hollywood remake practice that invests in sequelisation strategies that preserve long-term continuity, the chapter outlines nostalgia-driven pleasures and multi-generational appeal of those reboots that maintain continuity and facilitate immersion in an ongoing, already familiar story world.

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