Film and TV industry should realise that sometimes we need heroes to help us escape from reality – Alastair Stewart

Whatever happened to all of the heroes? asked The Stranglers. Indeed, that was the question on a recent flight when I had the time to finally binge season two of Picard, the continuation of the classic Star Trek: Next Generation series.

Immortalised in wax: Jedi knights Obi-Wan Kenobi, left, and Qui Gon Yin take on Darth Maul at Madame Tussauds (Picture: Stuart C Wilson/Getty Images)

How could Patrick Stewart make such a valiant effort to murder my holiday mood?

The problem is a simple one. We live in a world where we have run out of original ideas for our most treasured mediums. Everything has been borrowed and plundered after 120 years of cinema, radio and television.

The ubiquitous nature of the internet has made global cultural history instantaneously accessible. Every story can be resurrected, retold and reinterpreted. Most of them have been.

With that in mind, the need to continually plunder major franchises and transform them into unremitting "adaptations" is borderline criminal.

Some critics and fans praise “modern takes”. In the case of Star Wars and Star Trek, others condemn their sprawling bid to catch up with the Marvel universe.

They are all too aware they are playing with heroic characters whose longevity has outlasted their original creative teams. The result is a canonical mismatch of goofs and jagged characterisation.

Worse still, many of the newer directors and writers charged with older properties are not happy unless they are ripping them to shreds. It is baffling that something as broadly loved and syndicated as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has been remade into a serious crime drama.

And it is not "Hollywood" behind it as we understand the term. Streaming platforms like Amazon Prime, Disney, Apple and Netflix have an obsession with making increasingly dour contemporary adaptations.

The success behind franchises like Doctor Who is the in-built "regeneration" plot device. You could reimagine without breaking with what came before. Sixty years and umpteenth Doctors later, a creative decision was made to reveal “who” the Doctor finally was.

The madness seems determined to give fans not more of the same, which is creatively commendable, but a breakdown of beloved staples. Ratings, reviews and recommendations eventually dismiss this whole thing.

The debate between creative innovation, honouring legacy, and ripping up formats is hard to navigate. For the handful of naysayers who dismissed the latest James Bond outing as "too woke", plenty hailed it as a much-needed evolution.

The recent Batman movie from director Matt Reeves with Robert Pattinson in the titular cowl was a reasonable effort. And yet the same debate rages. The film is a dark, sprawling, miserable affair. But like with Bond, if you do not like it, another one pops along in a few years.

Television remakes are generally, truly, utterly dross. MacGyver, Magnum P.I., and The Equilizer have gutted what made their original namesakes tick. We can only be grateful no one has butchered The A-Team into a series.

Obi-Wan Kenobi comes out on Disney+ and promises a descent into yet another masochistic reinterpretation. Few people would be surprised if Ewan McGregor's take had the desert-dwelling Jedi drunk, broken with some addiction.

It has become too clichéd to describe everything as "post-modern". It went out of fashion in the 1990s alongside Francis Fukuyama's “end of history”.

What we have at the moment is cultural stagnation perpetuated by a cynical, roundabout recycling of characters and concepts because it is a safe bet.

What is the rationale behind the approach? The British academic Alan Kirby formulated "pseudo-modernism" in his 2006 essay The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond. Kirby links pseudo-modernism with the triteness and shallowness resulting from the instantaneous, direct, and superficial participation of audiences in their consumable pop culture.

As movies and TV are now a conversation between fans, reviewers, expectations, and social media commentary, we cannot assume producers are unaware of it. The backlash usually comes from a feeling that fans are shouting what they want, a false sense of participation, but those views are not listened to.

The results are a hybrid disappointment of everyone's expectations and creative growth when it comes to film releases.

As Kirby notes, "a triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert."

There is a sameness to it all and a commitment to taking harmless escapism and turning it into cynical, trash TV mirroring the tribulations in our world. The upcoming Amazon Lord of the Rings series promises to be a grim adaptation of a fantasy epic and has already been review-bombed with accusations it is too political.

No one holds their breath for a Frasier revival helmed by Kelsey Grammar. Look closer at some of these revivals with the original cast, like Picard and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the main actors share a dual mandate of executive producer.

Even historical dramas like Robert the Bruce (2019) suffered from Angus Macfadyen producing, writing and starring in the Braveheart ‘sequel’.

The old joke that these actors do not seem to have watched their original creation is half true. They spent years in front of and not behind the camera. So why are we surprised they do not see what we see?

Streaming services and variations in ratings mean programmes are not just valued by traditional audience scores and viewership, but whether critics and consumers are discussing them – whatever their opinion is.

Underpinning the problem is the gulf is between fan opinions and commercial practicality. Supply and demand have little bearing on what fans are force-fed. Calls for en masse cancellations of streaming subscriptions and reforming the BBC licence fee may be the only means left to pressure for better outputs.

Today's challenge is finding the purpose of our entertainment. For all the talk of producing prestige products like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, television and movies should be a reprieve from the realities around us.

“Thinking,” as Carl Jung noted, “is difficult. That is why most people judge.”