Review: Mystery Science Theater 3000's Netflix Reinvention Gets It Right

It’s about a week until the eleventh season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 — featuring the [...]

By Russ Burlingame

It's about a week until the eleventh season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 — featuring the first new episodes since 1999 — but for the thousands of fans who pledge nearly $6 million on Kickstarter to make it happen, the premiere episode was available today for streaming.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Season 11 Netflix Release Date

In accordance with the creators, who hope fans will go in relatively fresh and haven't even yet revealed the names of the movies being riffed, our review of the MST3K premiere will be spoiler-free.

The cult-favorite series — which centers on a blue-collar worker and two snarky robots forced by mad scientists to watch terrible movies in outer space — returns to a world of comedy shaped by its original run. When it first came into being in 1988, nobody had ever seen anything quite like it: series creator Joel Hodgson and his two robot friends would make fun of the movies in order to retain their sanity in the face of a cruel experiment designed to drive them mad.

Like some of Netflix's previous revivals, Mystery Science Theater 3000 exists on a tightrope of expectations: will it be too much like the classic MST3K? Will it be too different? And after 15 years of internet fandom mourning the loss of the long-running, low-budget comedy, will those fans turn out in support of, or be turned off by, the new take?

None of those questions can be definitively answered by a few thousand fans getting early access to a single episode — the full series premieres Friday on Netflix, so by next Sunday, A.D., you'll be able to judge it for yourself — but there are definitely some big takeaways from the episode the producers chose to act as the latest pilot.

It's hardly the first "pilot" for the series: it started on public access, and moved to The Sci-Fi Channel and Comedy Central over the life of the original run — even if many of the show's fans actually enjoyed it on VHS ("keep circulating the tapes" was an officially-sanctioned way of dealing with rights issues that would occasionally cut off re-runs and home video releases of older episodes). That means Netflix is at least the fourth new start for the beloved show, and with a new host and new actors playing the mad scientists, voicing the 'bots, and the like, the pilot had to not only entertain longtime viewers but set up the concept at least a little bit for anybody who might be coming in blind when the show makes its way to the streaming service next week.

But is it too different? Is it too much like the original?

…Well, no to both. The show manages to balance the two surprisingly well, with a handful of callbacks and an aesthetic similarity that's hard to deny being offset by the new cast, a significantly faster pace — a creative decision Hodgson has explained as a response to the rat-a-tat humor popularized on the internet and in shows like Family Guy — and the fact that HD production means that the "cheapness" of the host segments and other model-driven parts of the show takes on a whole new dimension.

The combination of original talent (including Hodgson himself) and new fan favorites like Community's Dan Harmon on the writing staff has left the show with the feel of a Saturday Night Live-style series that's just…always been there, and has evolved over the years. The fact that most of the younger talent involved, from stars Jonah Ray and Felicia Day to writers and even Netflix executives are self-professed fans of the '80s and '90s run.

That lent it not only a sense of continuity, but the willingness to be a little self-aware: in the one of the first host segments, there's a joke that will either ease the concerns -- or heighten the frustration -- of longtime viewers who objected to the re-casting of key players in the franchise.

Reaction on Twitter so far -- granted, it's only coming from people who are literally invested in the show's success, since today is a backers-only screening -- has been good, with most fans feeling that the tweaks to the format are generally for the better, and that the important aspects of the series have been retained.

And that is, at the end of the day, the best you could say about a relaunch like this. It's not Twin Peaks, which will debut soon on Showtime with the expectation that it will baffle and revolutionize. With MST3K, the goal was to do MST3K as well as the dozens of imitators who have come along since the original, and on that score, it succeeds. The new pilot may not crack your personal top ten best MST3K episodes, but it absolutely feels like an episode of the show, which isn't to be dismissed after nearly two decades of demands to bring the show back.

More Mystery Science Theater 3000 news:

The full new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will debut on Friday, April 14, on Netflix.

0comments
Start the Conversation

of