‘Reboot’ Canceled at Hulu After Just One Season
Wilson Chapman
The cast of “Step Right Up” should plan to step right up to some new projects. On Monday, Hulu canceled “Reboot,” the meta-satirical series about a sitcom reboot, after just one season.
Sources tell IndieWire that “Reboot” creator Steven Levitan, best known for co-creating “Modern Family” with Christopher Lloyd, is currently shopping the show to other outlets with hopes of finding it a new home.
“Reboot” centered around “Step Right Up”: an early 2000s family sitcom canonically revived at Hulu in 2022. The series sent up and examined the modern TV industry, lampooning studios’ cyclical obsession with reboots and the unsteady streaming business model; along with your old-fashioned backstage drama.
Paul Reiser and Rachel Bloom lead the cast of the series as the original creator of “Step Right Up” Gordon and his estranged daughter Hannah, who are forced to work together as co-showrunners on the reboot. Keegan-Michael Key, Johnny Knoxville, Calum Worthy, and Judy Greer play the four lead actors of “Step Right Up,” who reunite after two decades for the new series. Krista Marie Yu rounds out the cast as the studio executive in charge of the reboot.
Season 1 of “Reboot” premiered on September 20 with three episodes, with the remainder of its eight-episode season rolling out weekly through October 25. The show’s first and now only season ended on a cliffhanger, with Reiser’s character leaving the writer’s room for “Step Right Up,” Knoxville and Greer’s characters rekindling their romantic spark, and the reboot’s fate (fittingly) uncertain at Hulu.
Levitan executive produced “Reboot” with John Enbom, Danielle Stokdyk, and Jeff Morton, while Key served as a producer on the series. The show hailed from Levitan’s production company Levitan Productions along with 20th Television.
Upon its premiere, “Reboot” received mostly positive reviews, with critics giving specific praise to the show’s cast. In a more mixed write-up, IndieWire critic Ben Travers wrote that “over the first season’s eight, half-hour episodes, the ensemble comedy gets pulled in so many different directions, only a few aspects feel fine-tuned by the end. The industry satire is inconsistent, in both bite and budgeting. The office comedy can’t decide if it’s playing for punchlines (a la classic sitcoms) or more of a mood (like more modern single-cam series). And the characters never fill out beyond the thin sketches of what they represent.”
