Can you make an old hit new again?

Several cable networks and OTT providers are hoping to appeal to the mature end of the millennial demographic — that is 25-to-34-year-olds — by rebooting or remaking classic 1980s and 1990s TV shows.

Cartoon Network has reanimated The Powerpuff Girls, returning the characters to its schedule with a new series some 11 years after the original ended. Netflix’s Fuller House updated the 1990s ABC sitcom Full House, with the Tanner kids now grown up and raising children themselves. MTV has reimagined Scream, the 1990s horror-movie franchise that put Courteney Cox of Friends on the big screen in its first iteration.

And Disney Channel is remixing a rendition of Girl Meets World — featuring the now-grown kid stars of 1990s sitcom Boy Meets World.

All of these shows aim to appeal to busy millennials who are increasingly viewing content on nontraditional television platforms.

Today’s millennial viewers are often defined as cable cord-cutting, binge-watching viewers who devour the latest eclectic short-form content via digital platforms. Older members of the massive 16-to-34-year-old demo, though, still watch a lot of their TV the way baby boomers and Generation Xers do, gravitating to the long-form, classic content they grew up with back when cable was still cool.

ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL

The trend reflects a realization that all millennials are not the same, and not every YouTube video or short-form show will appeal to all consumers in the demo.

“All of these networks are looking at the millennial audience, and some are recognizing that [older millennials] really like reminiscing about their childhood,” David Quinn, senior brand lead for digital marketing firm Beamly, said. “It was a wonderful time and some millennials embrace that.”

Like boomers and Gen Xers, older millennials are finding that the responsibilities that come with work and family leave less time for entertainment. And, like those older demos, they’re often drawn to familiar content that resonates.

Nostalgia can be a big driver for remakes of movie and TV hits that have built-in audiences but may be sitting unused in the crowded soup of subscription VOD platforms. The challenge, of course, is to parlay that nostalgia and bring in the old crowd, as well as new viewers, without it all seeming tacky.

It’s a tricky challenge for TV’s demographic marketers, who parse the world in groups of boomers, Gen Xers and millennials.

And older millennials, particularly those with families, also watch more traditional television than their younger demographic cohorts. Millennials starting a family watch more than three hours a day of live TV — that’s over an hour more than single millenials consume, according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for fourth-quarter 2015.

That boosts the value of franchises that date back to older millennials’ childhoods, such as Cartoon Network’s The Powerpuff Girls and Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold!. Nick has set a Hey Arnold! special that picks up where the final episode of the animated series in 2002 left off .

Nickelodeon Franchise Properties senior vice president of content development Chris Viscardi said that franchises like Hey Arnold! and 1990s game show Legends of the Hidden Temple — which the network is turning into a live-action TV movie — give Nickelodeon a leg up on other entertainment networks trying to reach the elusive audience group.

Millennials with families are also more likely than not to introduce their kids to their childhood TV favorites, Viscardi said. That helps Nick reach out to a new generation of viewers.

“There is a huge millennial love for those series, so we know that millennial fans who grew up on them will come back,” Viscardi said. “There are some things inherent in our properties that we know a new generation of fans would love also.”

Nick is exploring several other older titles that it might resurrect and develop new episodes for, although Viscardi would not provide specific details.

Shows such as Girl Meets World — less a reboot than a 2014 spinoff of the 1993-2000 ABC series Boy Meets World, featuring grownup characters from the first series with children of their own — allows Disney Channel to reach a wide audience of both adults and kids, Sean Coccia, executive vice president of business operations and general manager for Disney Channels Worldwide, said.

To further encourage co-viewing, Disney will resurrect DuckTales, a 1987-1990 syndicated animated series built around Donald Duck’s nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie and his Uncle Scrooge, for its Disney XD network in 2017. And Disney Channel later this will year premiere Adventures in Babysitting, an original movie based loosely on the 1987 theatrical fi lm of the same name.

FAMILY AFFAIR

“For Disney Channel, it is not hard to reach these millennials if we deliver content that provides them with the opportunity to share an experience and time with their families,” Cocchia said. “Social media has also helped us by giving these millennial families platforms to talk about what they love and what they are seeing in the new storylines and characters.”

Classic entertainment franchises don’t always initially appeal to the older end of the millennial audience. MTV’s Scream series — based on the horror movie franchise of the same name launched 20 years ago — had its biggest audience among younger 16-to-24-year-olds during its freshman season last summer, according to MTV senior vice president of scripted programming Mina Lefevre.

Scream will return for its sophomore season in May.

“[Younger millennials] knew about Scream — some of them watched it and some of them didn’t — but they all knew about the value and iconic nature of Scream,” Lefevre said. “For us to reinvent it for them is where we stood. We thought we could make it as appealing and iconic to them as it was to [older millennials].”

Cartoon Network’s Miller said that networks looking to reach the full swath of millennials will ultimately have to market and promote differently to the younger and older segments of the demo. “There is absolutely a difference in how we create content for different audience segments because they all consume content differently,” Miller said. “We’ve devoted a lot of time and resources to really understanding all of our audiences and how they consume media — including millennials of all different life stages, not just ages — and we develop our strategies accordingly.”

For the older end of millennials, Beamly’s Quinn said the trend toward revitalizing 1990s classic programming is only beginning as distributors look for ways to reach an elusive audience that is looking for some familiarity to go alongside all the new content offered to them.

“I definitely think this is a trend that we’ll see continue going forward,” he said. “I think it makes perfect sense because if a network is looking to create entertainment in a crowded marketplace it’s nice to create entertainment that has a built-in audience.”

Amid overall ratings struggles for its parent company Viacom’s portfolio of cable networks, TV Land is looking to build its ratings fortunes by repositioning itself as a comedy-centric network focusing on a 25-54 audience, which is a departure from its previous target audience of 50-plus baby boomers. The network has traded earlier, older-skewing original shows like Hot in Cleveland for new comedies slash dramas like Younger, starring Sutton Foster as a 40-year-old mother trying to pass herself off as 26 to land her dream job, and the upcoming  Lopez series, in which comedian George Lopez plays himself as a Latino comedian who tries to balance the spoils of his success with his humble beginnings. Leading the network’s programming charge is Keith Cox, TV Land’s executive vice president of development and original programming. Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead and Cox spoke after the network’s upfront presentation in New York about the network’s repositioning, as well as some of the challenges it faces in a crowded programming environment. Here are some edited highlights.

MCN:How would you define the TV Land brand?

Keith Cox: The DNA for the channel has always been great comedies. Even with our acquisitions, we curated the best comedies that the broadcast networks offered. At the time, my role to augment that was to make multicam comedies like Hot in Cleveland that featured great casts and fun concepts. But now the TV landscape has become so crowded, with 400-plus shows. For comedies, it’s especially hard to get traction, unlike the great dramas that people are driven toward mostly because of serialized storytelling. Big things can happen in dramas — the killing off of main characters and other big surprises — that aren’t really done in comedy.

So where we mutated a bit is staying in comedy, but adding more dramatic elements; nobody’s really doing that in a half-hour sitcom. Our first foray into that was [producer] Darren Star’s Younger, and then we launched [dark comedy] Impastor, which has a big mystery element built in into it. So yes it’s an evolution, but it’s not a total rebrand because we’re still in the comedy space.

MCN:So if the brand has evolved, has your target audience changed as well from baby boomers over 50 to a younger audience?

KC: It was boomers, but they have aged, so now we’re looking at Gen X. We do like people with life experience … we sell adults 25-54, but we’re leaning more 18-49. We wanted to do something real and less fabricated, which is a risk, but it stands out for the audience.

MCN:How do you appeal to a younger audience while serving your core viewers?

KC: Through shows like Younger, which was our first soap and is working for us — we’ve just picked up our third season. With the Lopez show, I’ve always been a George Lopez fan and he knows how to push buttons but there is a lot of likeability there. He’s basically playing himself and he has a distinct voice. He really goes into some dark places, but it’s really funny. It’s a nice balance and it’s really a different genre and I’m excited about that.

MCN:What are the challenges you face as a programmer within a very crowded multichannel environment?

KC: There is a lot of TV in the marketplace and it’s hard to create urgency with the comedy genre. With Game of Thrones crazy stuff happens and people talk about it; The Walking Dead is eye-popping. Comedies are harder: they are there but you can catch them almost anytime, there isn’t as much urgency. People want spectacular television, so we need figure out how to add that drama into our comedies. You want to tell stories that invest the audience — we need to develop superfans. If you try to build it for everybody, it loses its voice.

There’s also a need for more diverse writers. That’s a challenge, but it’s an exciting challenge for us.

National Geographic Channel this week premiered a three-part series dubbed Generation X that examines the mostly unexplored exploits of some 65 million Americans within the demo. Nat Geo vice president of production and development Kevin Mohs – a Gen X’er himself -- said the series gives some love to an otherwise overlooked generation.

Here’s what Mohs said Nat Geo wants you to know about Generation X.

Gen X'ers are not slackers: "This generation has been overlooked or portrayed as slackers who haven’t done much in their lives and [as] just being disgruntled. But when you really step back and look you see that seismic shifts have happened because of this generation. You think about a lot of things that have been achieved in the last few decades and you never ask who’s responsible for it, so its our job dig deeper and look at the how and who’s behind everything."

Gen X'ers have influenced culture and technology:  "Take a look at Wiki-Leaks – why would somebody think its OK to leak national secrets to the world? But then you step back and say what were the things that formed that person that did that? Then you look at Watergate and the Pentagon Papers and the culmination of all those things that created that mindset. Same thing with Google and Amazon – how did someone think so out of the box to create those services? But if you step back and look at the bigger picture at what influenced such disruptors – MTV, fast foods, Napster – all things that were breaking the mold, so that’s how you come up with these great things. How does Obama become the first African-American President? We look at all the things within that generation that set the tone for what has happened today."

Generation X the series will put Generation X on the map: "We want to know what were the pivotal moments for the generation. It’s a really fast-paced way to explore the generation through the eyes of celebrities like Kevin Smith, Courtney Love, Sarah Palin and Molly Ringwald, along with a variety of experts and people providing different perspectives on the generation. We’re saying, look what this generation has accomplished, and here’s why. Hopefully people will begin talking about it … then we can be in the discussion with the baby boomers and the millennials."