Why We Love a Reunion

It brings me so much joy when two actors who were once on screen together simply... work together again

From what I can tell, every single person I have ever met is on a luxurious European vacation right now. 

But once upon a time, I was the one on a luxurious European vacation a.k.a. my family visited me while I was studying abroad in college. While we were in line to see the Palace of Versailles, I ran into an elementary school friend — someone I wasn’t sure I would ever see again, and definitely didn’t think I would wind up standing next to in France. 

It’s a strange feeling to reconnect with someone you once knew intimately in a place you’d never expect to see them, but it’s also exhilarating. Meeting up with a friend who I’d only ever spent time with in New York oceans away, outside what was once King Louis XIV’s home, reminded me that the little boxes we put parts of our life into are still all piled up together on this big, spinning earth. As kids, we laughed and cried and fought, and now here we were. Two adults making small talk, reminiscing silently about a childhood that felt worlds away. 

This kind of kismet, running into a friend from a past life on another continent, is a rare form of reunion. But life is filled with mini reunions, all producing a similar kind of magic. And television, in particular, is brimming with them. I recently came across a TikTok of a television reunion, which is one of my favorite things about watching TV: seeing two actors who meet up years later on screen again. This particular crossover was of Hilary Duff and Leighton Meester. Duff played the very important role of girl-who-had-a-threesome-with-Dan-and-Vanessa-and-made-it-weird on Gossip Girl, of which Meester was the star (sorry, Serena), in 2009. But in 2023, the two actresses shared the small screen again, this time as Meredith, an ex-girlfriend, and Sophie on Duff’s show How I Met Your Father. Whoever made that TikTok with “Night Changes” playing in the background as the actresses reunite was really trying to do a number on me because — even as someone who has never cared about One Direction and is only interested in Harry Styles because of the Don’t Worry Darling drama and the fact that he kissed Emily Ratajkowski — I will cry every time I hear that song.

Moment of silence for this outfit Hilary Duff wore on Gossip Girl

You might be thinking hun, these actors have to work, of course they’re gonna end up in multiple projects together, and I know that, but these little reunions still bring me joy. It reminds me why I love television so much in the first place: Actors create characters we care so deeply about, we start to believe they’re real people, as are their on-screen relationships. To see people who portrayed those characters shed the skin of one role and move onto the next gives me a sweet sadness, but seeing them team up again makes me nostalgic. It’s also validating. When you’ve spent hours of your life watching an actor transform into a character you come to care about, it stings when the show wraps, the actor moves on, and you’re forced to pretend it never happened. You find a new imaginary world to believe in. But an actor reunion can give a small nod to that past life — the show you once loved and invested so much time in. It says, “this was important to us, too.” Taylor Swift knew what she was doing when she recruited her ex Taylor Lautner and her previous music video’s stars Joey King and Presley Cash for the recent “I Can See You” video.  

Back in 2019, Apple TV and the minds behind marketing The Morning Show went full steam ahead on the nostalgia train while promoting the drama about an early morning news show. Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight, E! News and more jumped to highlight the real star of the show: an on-screen reunion between Jennifer Anniston and Reese Witherspoon, who appeared on Friends together back in the 90s. Anniston of course played Rachel Green, who my boyfriend continues to call his “celebrity crush” no matter how many times I insist that Rachel is in fact a character, and Witherspoon guest starred as Rachel’s younger sister Jill. Access Hollywood even had the actresses recreate one of their Friends scenes. The fact that so much excitement around The Morning Show was tied up in the fact that these two women were simply going to be on screen together again is silly when you remember that Witherspoon was only on two episodes of Friends — but alas! It made me interested in The Morning Show, something Billy Crudup simply couldn’t do (I was team Mary-Louise Parker as a toddler). We saw that type of promotion recently again, when Jon Hamm and John Slattery met up years after Mad Men for the film Maggie Moore(s).

The girls are BACK baby

There are other examples of the reunion being used as a tool to get us all jazzed about a show. For example, I probably never would have been the least bit interested in Good Sam had I not seen that the One Tree Hill girls were all in that one scene together. Hearing Hilarie Burton calling Bethany Joy Lenz “honey” is so Peyton coded. (To be fair I am still not going to watch this show, but I thought about it for a sec.) But there are also instances in which this sort of homecoming just feels like a little treat, like when Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat, who played a couple (and cousins… yes, both) on Arrested Development, appeared together on Veronica Mars. Or, speaking of Arrested Development, the fact that Jason Bateman and Will Arnett have a podcast and now mini series together with SmartLess. 

When I see two actors reunite, I can’t help but imagine their old characters reuniting with the new ones. I just know that Blair Waldorf would absolutely tear Hilary Duff’s How I Met Your Father’s character apart — and probably with good reason. (I also do this with real-life married couples, like imagining Alan Ruck’s Succession character Connor Roy in conversation with Mireille Enos’ The Killing character Sarah Linden, but perhaps that is a disease only I have been infected with.) But there’s also the feeling that perhaps these actors now know one another, and are even friends. We love celebrity friendships after all… yes I’m thinking of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg. But also Molly Gordon and Ayo Edebiri, who were both in The Bear and Theater Camp, currently in theaters. Oh, to be a fly on the wall…

Molly Gordon and Ayo Edebiri on set of The Bear. Why does this one actually have me in tears

Sometimes, the mere knowledge that two actors once existed in the form of another character together is enough to make a television show that much better. Rachel wrote last week about the real star of Sharp Objects — Camille’s messenger bag — but we can’t forget that long before Amy Adams as Camille put poor Chris Messina through absolute hell, she was his wife in the film Julie & Julia. Does it make her treating his character in Sharp Objects like garbage any easier to watch? Maybe! At the very least, it reminds me that despite how good an actor is they are just an actor. 

Just like seeing someone from childhood in a foreign country can make life feel truly like a simulation, I always appreciate a reminder that most everything on this earth, but definitely TV, is all make believe.

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B Plot

Question: Who is the most insufferable teenage TV character?

Mallika: Rachel Berry from Glee — maybe because Lea Michele was playing that character *ahem* a little too well... Was she worse than Game of Thrones’ Joffrey? Honestly, maybe.

Rachel: Maybe Meadow Soprano? Though honestly Meadow was fine as a teen — yes, she was angsty, but her on again off again boyfriend was killed and her dad’s the head of a crime family give her a break! It was when she became a snotty college kid with an incredibly unearned moral high ground that I couldn’t stand her. Her and Rory Gilmore are two sides of the same coin. Those shows ARE paradoxically linked according to one reddit poster.

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C Plot

Director David Fincher (Social Network, Gone Girl, Fight Club) crushed the dreams of true-crime-junkies (plus Rachel who thinks true crime is BAD but is somehow always in the mood to watch Zodiac) everywhere when he confirmed in February that his show Mindhunter, which is set in 1977 and follows two FBI agents (Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany) investigating the minds of serial killers, would not be returning for a third season because “it is a particularly expensive show and, in the eyes of Netflix, we did not attract a large enough audience to justify such an investment.” The passive aggression… that man is a Virgo through and through. But it seems this posturing might have paid off. Fans of Mindhunter this week put together a petition demanding a third season, collecting over 76,000 signatures so far. Rachel will be signing because that show is HER True Detective.

You’re not slick, David Fincher.

Speaking of Fincher, reality TV stars told Bravo, “you better lawyer up, asshole.” Reality TV’s reckoning is coming, according to Real Housewife Bethany Frankel, who suggested that wildly underpaid reality TV stars should unionize and go on strike. Although Lisa Vanderpump, the Elphaba to Frankel’s Glenda, chimed in saying unionizing likely wouldn’t fit within the “economic reality” of unscripted programming, which she said exists “in large part because it’s a better price point." Either way, Bravo is getting sued.

Anyone who read Prince Harry’s unhinged memoir Spare, or listened to the Celebrity Memoir Bookclub episode about it, knows that the wildest revelation to come out of that book was that apparently everyone in the U.K. is obsessed with Suits?? Well, the royal couple might be having a rocky go of things lately, but Suits keeps winning. The show achieved the 13th biggest week ever recorded on this week’s Nielsen weekly streaming rankings, with viewers watching the show for 3.9 billion minutes during the week of July 17-23. When the strikes end, Markle should really consider putting that blazer back on… that family needs a breadwinner.