FOX Replaces American Idol With Reboots, Movie Knock-Offs

With American Idol cancelled, the FOX network is turning to a combination of reboots and movie knock-offs to populate their 2016-2017 season. Following in the new grand tradition of it’s far easier to just rework old shows or make film adaptions than to come up with original series, the FOX fall lineup feels like we’ve somehow gone back in time 10 or 20 years.

Instead of our beloved American Idol, FOX will be populating the network with shows like reboots of Prison Break and 24, along with TV adaptions of The Exorcist and Lethal Weapon. Because, apparently, we need to remake things that were perfectly fine the first time around and should probably just stay in their classically appreciated form instead of being dug up from their graves and made into new zombie TV shows. What is most entertaining about this, is that FOX insists on calling all of this “original programming.”

“Next season on Fox, we’ll have more original programming across our schedule than ever before,” said Fox Television Group co-chairmen and co-CEOs Dana Walden and Gary Newman in a press statement, according to AdWeek.com. “We’ll use our strong established hits in the fall and Super Bowl LI in winter to launch a diverse slate of shows that are unmistakably Fox.”

Actually, we’d argue that unless we knew this shows were on FOX, we might think we’d stumbled onto some kind of retro TV channel.

Although Newman said that the post-American Idol  aftermath “keeps up a bit at night, thinking about how we’re going to fill that time,” he is “confident we have the goods, and then we just have to be smart when it comes to scheduling.”