A new season of the Emmy Award-winning reality TV show Queer Eye starts streaming on Netflix today (February 7), 10 years after its so-called “final” episode.
It’s the latest in a spate of shows to be rebooted for a modern audience, with the home improvement classic Trading Spaces also making a comeback in April.
So what other reality shows are missing from the TV schedules? Below are 10 guilty pleasures we want back on our screens, stat.
10. Pimp My Ride (2004 – 2007)
There have been calls to reboot this show ever since it ended a decasde ago. In short, presenter Xzibit and his crew took people’s beat-up cars and remodeled them inside and out, with bells and whistles that included hot tubs, a 300 lb subwoofer, and puke-inducing paint jobs. A reboot doesn’t seem likely though, especially given this response from X last year.
9. Murder in Small Town X (2001)
The popularity of whodunnit crime dramas like Broadchurch, Line of Duty and Big Little Lies suggests a comeback for this short-lived show is well overdue. It took 10 contestants and dropped them in a fictional remote Maine fishing village to solve a series of murders. The stakes were upped every few days, as two contestants were sent out to separate locations — one would survive and bring back an important clue, while the other would be “murdered” by the killer. Who’s starting the petition for this one?
8. Beauty and the Geek (2005 – 2008)
The brainchild of one Ashton Kutcher, this show pandered to every gender stereotype in the book. Billed as “the ultimate social experiment,” it took a group of “beauties” (i.e. women with more than a passing interest in nail gloss) with a group of “geeks” (i.e. men with the social skills of an awkward rhinoceros), and paired them up. Okay, so the premise was hokey as hell, but it often resulted in unexpectedly touching results.
7. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (2010-2011)
Some reality TV shows tried to highlight social ills, and should be brought back on that account. Chef Jamie Oliver managed to change school policy in the U.K. with his campaigning show Jamie’s School Dinners. His mission to reform America’s school lunch programs didn’t go so well, however, and ABC opted not to renew the series after two seasons. Boo. Bring. It. Back.
6. Work of Art (2010 – 2011)
The company behind Project Runway and Top Chef turned their attention to the world of art for this show, which pitted 14 up-and-coming artists against each for the chance to hold a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and win a cash prize of $100,000. Despite its reality show credentials, it was surprisingly good, but even having Sarah Jessica Parker as an executive producer didn’t save it from being axed after two seasons. Encore!
5. How Clean Is Your House? (2004 – 2005)
This show saw expert cleaners Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie visit people’s homes and clean them. That’s it. Oh, except for one thing: the homes were filthy. Like all good reality shows, it was really a thinly veiled excuse to poke around other people’s houses, and feel much better about the dirty dishes or unmade bed in your own. Kim and Aggie were a class act, too, and more than a little terrifying.
4. The Osbournes (2002 – 2005)
The show may have ended in 2005, but the Osbourne drama continues. Sharon and Ozzy have split and got back together and split again many times, while their kids Kelly and Jack have gone on to have their own TV projects. As crackpot families go, they’ve been superseded by the Kardashians — but spinoff show Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour proves nothing quite matches Ozzy’s downright bizarre, potty-mouthed daily life.
3. Man vs Wild (2006 – 2011)
Adventurer and survivalist Bear Grylls parted ways with the Discovery Channel in 2011, after 68 episodes of a show that saw him abandoned in various inhospitable places and left to fend for himself (with only a film crew for assistance, ahem). Bear has since gone on to host reality competitions and even shown celebrities like Kate Winslet and President Barack Obama how to survive in the wild — but nothing beats the sheer grit of his first TV show.
2. The Simple Life (2003 – 2007)
Despite its notoriety for having spawned the phenomenon that is Kim Kardashian, this show at least had a premise beyond simply staging “reality.” It starred “It girls” Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie as they tried their hand at minimum wage jobs — the first job of any kind they had done, in fact. The results were sketchy at best, but the girls gamely sent themselves up, with some moments of true hilarity.
1. The Real World (1992 -)
The Real World may not have been the very first reality TV show (that honor belongs to Dutch reality soap opera Nummer 28), but it’s the one that kickstarted the genre and made it a true phenomenon. The premise may not seem original to us now — each season saw seven strangers thrown together in a house in a major city — but in its time it was a revolutionary study in how actual young people behaved and acted on camera. It doesn’t need a reboot, per se, as it’s still on MTV, but a return to its social experiment roots wouldn’t go amiss.
Which “guilty pleasure” reality show would you like to see rebooted?