For years, the rule in Hollywood was pretty simple: familiarity but with a twist. Cheers, but it’s in a coffee shop, and everyone’s in their twenties. Lost, but it’s in LA with Joseph Fiennes. Sure, this didn’t always work – I still think fondly of you, FlashForward – but it worked a lot of the time. Crucially, it was easy to grasp why it should work. We love formulas, and we love gentle variations on the formula to keep us guessing, to keep us nimble. But at the heart of it there’s familiarity, and familiarity is a very, very lovely thing in the right circumstances.
