I never knew I needed the Doctor to disrupt one of King James’ infamous 16th century witch trials, while snarking about the women’s clothing’s inferior pockets—but I absolutely did. Since the 1960s, Doctor Who has centered around an all-powerful man and the young, sexy women who are along for the ride. Though the Doctor is ever-changing (the character regenerates at regular intervals) each iteration boasts another white, mostly upper class, largely condescending, British man. But Doctor Who as helmed by Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor—whose band of friends (not companions, and certainly not assistants) comprises a Pakistani female police officer, a black warehouse worker with dyspraxia, and his white step-grandfather—finally looks and feels like the world I live in. And it feels good.

That feeling is representation. It’s extremely powerful, and historically, for women and minorities, extremely hard to come by in movies and television. Which is something our culture (caterwaulers aside) is only recently being strong-armed into trying to fix.

In this era of reboots, the issue of how to wrench programming into the twenty-first century is especially acute because now-problematic shows that were beloved in their time are constantly being drawn back to the fore of cultural conversation. The solution studio executives and casting directors have landed on, it seems, is to remake the classics with diverse new casts: They did it with Ghostbusters, with Ocean’s 8, with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, with Charmed, with (bizarrely) What Women Want, with Magnum P.I., and with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But here’s the thing: Very few people are truly happy about it. Some Doctor Who fans, for example, find it easy to accept a two-hearted, quasi-immortal alien who travels through space and time in a police call box, while a female incarnation of that time-traveling alien strains credulity. These reboots are not, as imagined by their most vehement detractors, being lapped up by legions of man-hating, white-bashing snowflakes. When these “progressive” reimaginings try to strike that representation chord, they often hit a sour note—tokenism.

In truth, it would be hard for most of them to avoid it. This more inclusive season of Doctor Who, for example, works because change, even radical change, is not just organic, but essential to the Doctor’s world. Not only does the Doctor swap faces and personalities and choice of traveling companion often, the character is a vessel for a show that celebrates the value of seeing and doing as things wildly outside your own experience. Changing the Doctor’s gender might be a larger shift than in past seasons, but it was necessary to wake the franchise up.

But this spate of other updates, which graft diverse characters onto skeletons built in less inclusive times, have a lazy, hand-me-down quality to them. If you want to successfully re-launch a franchise today, you can’t put old lines in new mouths and expect that to be enough to make people who’ve waited to see their experience reflected on screen feel seen.

Regardless of your intentions, switching up a beloved character or universe almost always freaks out fans. In spite of the Doctor’s constant shifting, he has nearly always been played by an uppercrusty English-sounding white dude over thirty. There was backlash when Christopher Eccleston played the Doctor sounding working class and Northern, and when Matt Smith took the role at age 26—and that was in 2005 and 2010, respectively. Though the initial reaction when the BBC announced Jodie Whittaker would be the first female Doctor, was a big, sexist, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey mess. But almost always, after a few hours of getting to know the new Doctor, the vast majority of fans come around. The show wouldn’t still be on the air if they hadn’t.

That’s because each Doctor is a new person with new priorities rather than a different actor taking a crack at the same role, written in the same way. It’s essentially a franchise, and successful franchises must progress in their concepts and politics and aesthetics—think about how weird it would be if everyone in Star Wars still had 1970s hair. The new Star Wars movies work because the galaxy has moved on and new characters rise up to drive and respond to those changes—just like they do real world. Insisting that universes need to maintain the exact same structure and demographics is like freaking out that Ariana Grande is usurping Elton John’s place at the top of the charts: It’s just culture coming up with fresh ideas to fit the times. Each incarnation of the Doctor moves the Whovian world forward, which makes inclusion feel like natural progress, rather than a whitewashing of dark history.

Recasting a different woman as Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn’t push the narrative forward—unless we’re to believe that in each generation a slayer who must be named Buffy is born. This is where the of vast majority of woke-ified reboots fail. They respond to calls for change by retreading old ground—an insulting move on a few different levels. Reboots, remakes, and sequels abound because they’re easy to get greenlit: Executives feel safer shelling out cash for things they know have worked before, things that have a built-in audience. Which is already unsatisfying, but somewhat worse when you consider that many of these reboots have female showrunners and/or showrunners of color, some of whom have explicitly stated that doing a remake of an existing show is the only way to get their stories greenlit. The implication: Stories about women and minorities aren’t seen as marketable enough to stand on their own, unless they are standing on the shoulders of a story by and for white men. Which, even just from a box office numbers standpoint, is plainly wrong.

It’s a compromise that pleases nobody. Recasting Charmed to center around a Latinx family, and recasting Hermione and Buffy as black doesn’t necessarily induce that feeling of being seen, because identity is (duh) more than skin deep. If you want to make a progressive reboot really work and not feel like a half-hearted attempt to appease, you have to make room for wholly new characters with fully realized identities that reach beyond skin color or gender or sexuality. To do otherwise is tokenizing, and simply not good television. People know when they’re being asked to accept less than they’re due, and trying to make a character conceived in the past work in the present is doomed to spawn confused characterization and constant comparison, which serves no one.

In the case of so many of these incredible genre properties and ideas, it would be so easy to do better if only they were bolder: As others have pointed out, Buffy already has a canonical, criminally under-developed black slayer, Kendra, who could make the trip back from the dead like so many other characters and star in her own series. And a Latinx redux of Charmed seems even wanner when Brujas, an original show about Afro-Latina witches, is on its way.

True inclusivity either means telling new stories in addition to the old, or having the courage to push an established world into the future rather than rewriting the past. Diversity isn’t a varnish you can apply to what’s familiar. It’s an expanded universe.

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