10 Gender-Swapped TV Reboots, Ranked

The 2014 CBS pilot How I Met Your Dad — a How I Met Your Mother spinoff starring Greta Gerwig and narrated by Meg Ryan — never made it to air. But several years later, Hulu gave us How I Met Your Father, with Hilary Duff in the type of role that Josh Radnor played on HIMYM. So far, however, the comedy just feels like a retread of the original series — updated for a new decade, perhaps, but offering little more humor than a family photo slideshow.

Three decades after Hawaii Five-O finished, CBS brought the concept back as Hawaii Five-0. (The zero makes a big difference, apparently.) And again, two white dudes led the cast, but this time, the character of Kono Kalakaua was a woman played by Grace Park. But Five-0 was another by-the-numbers addition to CBS’ stable of crimefighting procedurals, and Park and Daniel Dae Kim eventually left the series after being denied the salary of their costars.

This series is a reboot of the 1980s series of the same name, with Queen Latifah stepping in for Edward Woodward as the spy-turned-vigilante protagonist. We’d say The Equalizer still doesn’t equal Queen Latifah’s talent, but we’re rooting for it nonetheless: Action TV shows starring Black women are woefully few and far between.

The new Kung Fu kept the name and the martial arts of the ’70s series starring David Carradine and shed everything else, including the yellowface controversy. (This time around, it’s not a white actor in the lead role.) In the current version, Olivia Liang plays Nicky Shen, a college dropout who uses her fighting abilities to protect her San Francisco neighborhood. It’s a CW show that looks like a CW show, but for many viewers, that works.

The prognosis is good for this family-friendly medical drama, which cleverly reboots the 90s-era series Doogie Howser, M.D. by citing it directly: After teen prodigy Lahela Kameāloha (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) starts working at a hospital, her adult colleagues dub her “Doogie” in reference to the Neil Patrick Harris character from the original. But that’s about where the connections end, giving this Hawaii-set show a chance to set out on a course of its own.

As far as we can deduce, Lucy Liu played Sherlock’s partner-in-solving-crime Dr. Watson — originally written by Arthur Conan Doyle as John Watson, a man — more than any other actor after appearing in 152 episodes of this CBS series. Thanks to the repartee and rapport between Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes and Liu’s Joan Watson — and the writers’ wise decision to keep the two characters’ relationship professional — this series kept viewers beguiled for seven seasons.

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that The Bachelorette is one of TV’s most successful gender-swapped reboots — by longevity, at least, not by romantic track record. Now in its third decade on TV, this dating competition — like its predecessor, The Bachelor — is still going. Even after umpteen controversies for the franchise, the bloom isn’t off the rose just yet.

Zoë Kravitz led the cast of this canceled-too-soon Hulu series, following in the footsteps of her mother, Lisa Bonet, who appeared in the 2000 film starring John Cusack. But Hulu’s High Fidelity only sampled the film and the Nicholas Hornby book upon which both are based, finding new beats and harmonies in the playlist of its protagonist’s romantic life.

It only took this British sci-fi franchise a half-century to hire anyone but a white man to play its titular Time Lord, but finally, Jodie Whittaker took over the TARDIS in 2017 as the Doctor Who’s Thirteenth Doctor, ushering in a new era for representation in the series. Whittaker, of course, won over critics… if not the sexist fans who are apparently stuck in a less inclusive dimension.

Much to the dismay of at least one actor from the original Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck and Boomer were both women in Syfy’s 2004 miniseries and 2005 series continuation. And the new Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) and Boomer (Park again) happened to be two of the most compelling, complex characters in the updated version, a magnum opus showing humanity at its least humane in a war against A.I. it had created. So say we all.