A few years ago, Mayim Bialik started talking seriously about rebooting Blossom, her breakthrough sitcom in which she starred as a plucky teen girl with a funky hat collection and a womanizing older brother with a penchant for saying “Whoa.” The original NBC show never had the prime TGIF real estate, but it ran for five seasons in the ’90s. Despite never really working in syndication, Blossom became a quasi-cultural touchstone—primarily for hats, “whoas,” and Bialik’s continued television presence. But the show was pretty groundbreaking for its time, often dealing with mature problems like sexual assault, gun violence, and drugs, so maybe it was a little too adult for TGIF anyway. To that end, Bialik hoped to reboot the show “not as a sitcom” but rather as a means of bringing back “these interesting, deep characters—a child of divorce, a recovering drug addict, an alcoholic—to see them in a whole new way.” Alas, she won’t have the chance.
Mayim Bialik posted on her Substack that the reboot isn’t moving forward. (To answer your questions: Yes, Mayiam Bialik has a Substack, with 78,000 subscribers, and, yes, this was a paid post. No, we won’t be diving into it any further.) She writes that the reboot came together after reconnecting with Blossom creator Don Reo in the wake of The Big Bang Theory’s final season. Reo got to work and wrote a “beautiful” script, according to Bialik. “What would Blossom be like 30 years later?” she writes. “Don wrote a draft in one sitting. He said it just flowed out of him. It wasn’t writing so much as it was receiving. He found our characters exactly where many of us find ourselves – funny, lost, wandering, meandering, and torn. The script is beautiful.”
However, because Bialik was so busy co-hosting Jeopardy! and starring for three seasons on Call Me Kat, Blossom hit the back burner. Still, she and Reo pitched the show, and Disney “seemed” to love it. Unfortunately, Disney lost interest, and “for no particular reason, we were told ‘no.'” Though she and Reo asked to buy the rights to bring the show to another studio, she was “told Disney reserves the rights in case they ever want to do a reboot of Blossom.” Bialik blames the “constant changing of guards in our industry, the mergers, the insincerity and the increasingly extended periods of time it takes to get answers or contracts completed.” But maybe the market just wasn’t ready for more Blossom.
“While it is possible no one wants a Blossom reboot, I’m pretty certain Disney got this one wrong,” she writes. “The sun is gonna surely shine. Maybe not the way Don and I intended, but this door closed. While we didn’t want it to, we are powerless over every aspect of it except what we know to be true: we loved this possibility with all that we have and we are so so sorry we couldn’t get it to happen.”
(via TVLine)
