Next month Netflix unveils their SF television series Lost in Space a reboot of the 60’s show of the same title. Again the premise of the show is essentially The Swiss Family Robinson but in space.

In the original series the Robinson family is departing for Alpha Centauri to start humanity’s first interstellar colony. The logistic of the premise is laughable. A single family founding a colony, the genetics are a nightmare. For reasons a hostile foreign power, never identified as to which power or why, attempts the sabotage the mission. The saboteur is trapped aboard the vessel at launch and ends up trapped with the Robinsons when their ship veers wildly off course and they are lost in the unmapped vastness of the cosmos.

Very quickly an ensemble show transformed into a children’s program focused on Will Robinson, the precocious young boy of the series, the ship’s robot, and Dr. Smith, the saboteur but now a character of comic relief and defanged of all serious threat. The show ran three years and produced classic SF ideas such as a rebellion of vegetables. The show was bad.

So if I did not care for the original, does that mean I will be skipped this reboot? No. Here is my core rule for remakes and reboots; they should only remake material that was bad.

If you attempt to remake a good show or movie, particularly if we are talking a classic, you are almost certainly going to do worse. It’s hard enough to make good narrative material, it’s harder to improve on material that has already achieved quality and that should be avoided. However, bad source material, well, you might find a way to make something good out of that.

Given that Netflix’s original series may indeed salvage something worthwhile from the concept. After all, the original, The Swiss Family Robinson, itself was a remake of Robinson Crusoe but with a good god-fearing Christian family as the principal characters. (In the book the family was not named Robinson, but Irwin Allen was never known for subtlety.)

I shall keep my expectations low, but I will give at least the pilot a go.