Mystery Science Theater 3000 never really went away. Joel Hodgson's hyper-verbal, stupid-smart series—in which a group of space-marooned wiseacres riffed on atrocious movies—may have gone off the air in 1999, but by then, its wry, pop-culturally astute commentary style was already becoming the default language of the internet. Every sarcastic comments-section pile-on, every meme-filled live-Tweet spree, every non-racist YouTube discussion (those exist, right?) owes a small debt to MST3K, which proved that, so long as you had sharp one-liners and good intentions, talking back to the screen could be a joyous, justifiable pursuit.
Which is why you might have been a little worried when you heard MST3K was being revived, via the new Netflix series Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (the 14-episode first season arrives in full today). After all, at a time when (ostensibly) witty putdowns and see-what-I-did-there reference-tossing have become the web's de facto lingua franca, what need could there be for more from-the-rafters riffing? And could *MST3K'*s mix of high- and lowbrow know-how, not to mention its gentle touch, still work in an era when everything is subject to easy, exhausting insta-commentary?
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Thankfully, the hands of fate seem to be working in *MST3K'*s favor—at least based on the premiere episode, in which our heroes suffer through Reptilicus, a 1961 Danish monster-movie whose titular raised-from-the-dead baddie looks like a garden hose made out of Play-Doh. Hodgson is back aboard, though this time as a writer and co-director, with the main duties being handed over to a new generation: Actor and comedian Jonah Ray is Jonah Heston, a well-intentioned Gizmonic employee who's forced to live aboard the Satellite of Love, where he has to endure awful movies alongside talking robots Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy (the team's new tormentors are played by Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day, both clearly having lots of I-can't-believe-I-get-to-do-this fun). There have been a few upgrades—Servo can now fly up to the screen, for starters, and all the 'bots have new voices—but the show's amicable aesthetic remains intact: There are still those wonderfully DIY miniature-sets, and the Satellite of Love captives still yammer away in that familiar below-the-screen silhouette. For many returning fans, the new MST3K will immediately push all the right buttons.
Yet The Return doesn't coast on nostalgia; this is a show set in the not-too-distant-future, and Hodgson and his team wisely opt to keep things moving forward. It will likely take longtime fans a few minutes to adjust to Ray and the new performers, but once they do, they'll find the latest MST3K host to be a likable mash-up of Hodgson's workaday wryness with Mike Nelson's gee-wiz good-guy vibe. Ray has the kind of Muppety spirit and polymath talents a show like this requires; by the time he performed a sweetly goofy rap about monsters from around the world, I was won over.
And as for the riffs? Oh, man—the riffs are so good. If you were at all concerned that the latest MST3K would sabotage itself with all kinds of cool-seeking modern-day references, have no fear: While there are a few nods to the web era (Twitter, photobombs, etc.), they're now simply part of the show's decades-spanning pop-culture continuum—a mix of the obscure and the over-familiar from TV, movies, and music that fuels every great MST3K joke-run. In Reptilicus alone, the gang invokes everything from Lil' Abner to Prince's "Starfish and Coffee" to Carvell Ice Cream commercials to Sailor Moon. The one-liners come at you fast and loose, with an 80-85 percent joke-landing rate (which is, truth be told, pretty much on par with the original series). And while MST3K has always been one of the best-written shows on television, the new series benefits from having brought on a few longtime fans (including *Community'*s Dan Harmon) who know how to speak its excitable, egalitarian language. Thanks to those crackerjack riff-writers, as well as the cast's "let's put on a show while we put down a movie" energy, MST3K has been reborn, gloriously and ridiculously—kind of like Reptilicus himself.