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The Wonder Years Neal Marlens, Carol Black, and Bob Brush, 1988-1993 The first words spoken on The Wonder Years, over the opening chords of the Byrds’ iconic cover of “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, are “1968. I was twelve years old.” It would be a neat bit of symmetry if I could say that when the first episode aired, immediately after the first Super Bowl I ever watched, I too was twelve years old. But I wasn’t. I was thirteen. The show became an instant phenomenon: its first season consisted of a grand total of six episodes, in an era when the standard was twenty-two, and yet it still won the Emmy. And it quickly became my favorite show. My friends rolled their eyes whenever I brought it up—they had long since outgrown tales of the horrors of seventh grade, because they were in eleventh. So was I. And I was just starting to realize what I had missed out on by skipping the grades that had put me there. So while I doubt I would have said this at the time, in retrospect I suppose that I watched the first couple of seasons of The Wonder Years at least in part as a way to vicariously experience going through junior high with a peer group instead of with a bunch of older kids. Winnie Cooper became my first big TV crush, not to mention a model for the girl two doors down in the novel I wrote a decade later (and, more literally, a model for another major character: you would not be off by very much if you imagined Echo spending most of the book making this face). But I didn’t bring a TV to college, and I probably wouldn’t have been watching The Wonder Years even if I had: season three, which aired during my senior year of high school, was uneven enough that my interest had already started to wane. So when Ellie pulled this up on Hulu, I was skeptical about how well it would hold up. My standards were not particularly high when I was thirteen; for that matter, the general standard for what constituted good television in 1988 was not quite what it is today. My previous favorite show had probably been Max Headroom, which was considered sophisticated and groundbreaking in its time and did not hold up particularly well when I rewatched it in 2017, except to the extent that it predicted a world in which the chief executive would blather incessantly about TV ratings. I prepared for a similar letdown. As it turned out, though, those first couple of seasons of The Wonder Years remain surprisingly poignant. Or maybe it’s not so surprising, given that the show is engineered to be a sort of poignancy delivery system. The Wonder Years is an exercise in double nostalgia. We watch Kevin Arnold’s journey through adolescence through the eyes of his modern-day self, twenty years older, looking back with equal amounts of fondness and chagrin. But Kevin himself spends much of that adolescence dwelling on a childhood he wants both to cling to and put aside. One of the show’s most common gimmicks is to roll clips of home movies showing us the way things were when Kevin was a little boy, as thirty-something Kevin relates teenage Kevin’s bittersweet thoughts about how everything had already changed since then. Or rather, he takes those thoughts and renders them in the language of an introspective adult. One reason The Wonder Years holds up as well as it does is that by putting the burden of eloquence on the narrator, the show frees up the characters to sound like actual humans. Sitcom banter may get laughs in its time, but it ages badly. The archetypal Wonder Years conversation, by contrast, goes “Hi.” “Hi.” “Hi.” That makes me smile a lot more in 2020 than the repartee on other shows of the era. Like, one of the nominated shows The Wonder Years beat out for its Emmy was Night Court, a wacky gag-fest which feels like it belongs to a different generation. Of course, one could argue that the reason it feels like it belongs to a different generation is that The Wonder Years is literally set a generation distant from when it aired. The initial premise is compelling: Kevin Arnold begins the tumultuous changes of adolescence just as the nation undergoes the tumultuous changes of 1968. That’s one reason the show declined as it went on: “Kevin Arnold lives the life of an ordinary 16-year-old in 1972” doesn’t capture the imagination in quite the same way. But one sign that The Wonder Years doesn’t belong to our generation is that modern shows set in the past, like Mad Men or even Stranger Things, are meticulous about capturing their respective eras. (That mall in Stranger Things 3 had me reeling with nostalgia—it was very close to perfect.) The Wonder Years is a lot more hit-and-miss on this score. The costumers do a good job dressing up Kevin’s mother Norma as a ’60s housewife, and his sister Karen as a hippie; paisley shirts and flower stickers are in evidence; the cars look right. But all those boys with their ’80s hair give away the game. Kevin, in what is supposedly 1972, dresses like he just stepped out of my 1989 yearbook. It sort of feels as though, once the show had drifted away from its initial temporal moorings—as it had to, as the aging of the child actors meant that the show had to move forward in real time—there was no point in making anything more than a half-hearted attempt to maintain the period. Era-specific plot points such as “Winnie’s brother is killed in Vietnam” and “Karen’s hippie boyfriend argues with her conservative dad” recede into the background, replaced by more generic storylines—so generic, sometimes, that they are clearly spec scripts that could have been plugged into basically any half-hour sitcom. Kevin gets wrapped up in the drama of some kids at school (or occasionally a quirky teacher, distant relative, or dental hygienist) whom we’ve never seen before and will never see again, and at no point does the episode really speak to either of the main premises. I say “either” because, in addition to the “twelve years old in 1968” premise, there was another: “There’s no pretty way to put this. I grew up in the suburbs. I guess most people think of the suburbs as a place with all the disadvantages of the city and none of the advantages of the country—and vice versa. But in a way, those really were the wonder years for us there in the suburbs… it was kind of a golden age for kids.” By the end of the first episode, this suburban boosterism has turned polemical. Kevin tracks down the bereaved Winnie in the woods where as kids they used to catch fireflies, and consoles her with a kiss. “It was the first kiss for both of us. We never really talked about it afterward. But I think about the events of that day again and again. And somehow I know that Winnie does too, whenever some blowhard starts talking about the anonymity of the suburbs or the mindlessness of the TV generation. Because we know that inside each one of those identical boxes, with its Dodge parked out front and its white bread on the table and its TV set glowing blue in the falling dusk, there were people with stories, there were families bound together in the pain and the struggle of love. There were moments that made us cry with laughter, and there were moments, like that one, of sorrow and wonder.” That really hit me where I lived, because I hoped to someday write stories that evoked these deep human experiences… but I was from Anaheim Hills. Were you allowed to suggest that your childhood experiences were important to you if you didn’t grow up on a farm milking cows or in Brooklyn playing stickball? Here was a show that said you could. Future Wonder Years showrunner Bob Brush said that when he read the pilot script by Neal Marlens and Carol Black, he thought, “They’ve just enfranchised a whole part of America that’s never been celebrated before.” I don’t know whether the celebration is warranted, but I’m all for the enfranchisement: the suburbs, like anywhere else, are full of people with powerful stories and places with fascinating, unique histories. Except The Wonder Years deliberately steers clear of all that. Rather than digging into specifics, the show makes a point of never naming Kevin’s suburb, or even his state—he’s supposed to live in Anytown, U.S.A. (I guess that worked for some people—even though it never snows on the show, you can see palm trees visible at the end of his street, and you can visit his house the next time you happen to be in Burbank, I’ve read articles whose authors said they imagined Kevin living on Long Island or in New Jersey.) Even worse, Kevin himself is a cipher. The creative team does everything it can to make him a generic everykid: neither smart nor stupid, neither athletic nor clumsy, neither popular nor an outcast. He has no particular interests or skills of note. Here’s Scott McCloud on why storytellers might make this choice:
 Kevin isn’t really meant to be a character so much as a vehicle for audience identification. Similarly, Winnie Cooper isn’t really a character so much as an archetype. She’s the girl next door with the great big doe eyes, the slightly melancholy air, and the magnificent theme song that sounds exactly like a crush feels. And it makes a certain sort of sense why the creators wouldn’t want her to be much else: they wanted to maximize the number of viewers who would fall in love with her, and each additional trait risked turning off some percentage of those viewers. But this left her with little more to do than her namesake and fellow hairband enthusiast, Gwen Stacy: periodically break up with the protagonist and make him jealous, then get back together with him and serve as his lodestar of niceness. Repeat on Sweeps Week as needed. The problem, apart from the simple fact that it’s kind of dull to follow the story of Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, is that the structure of the typical Wonder Years episode goes something like this:
That’s fine for a season. Over the course of 115 episodes, though, that means that Kevin has to learn 115 lessons. If you have to learn 115 lessons about how to be a decent person, you’re no longer a non-entity—you’re actually pretty terrible! Especially considering that some of those lessons are repeats of earlier lessons that didn’t take. Imagine that The Wonder Years had been about Kevin’s friend Paul. Paul had a lot to learn growing up, as we all do. He certainly had his moments of immaturity. He even made some pretty boneheaded mistakes. If the show had been about him, then in a standard 22-episode season there would probably be half a dozen episodes in which Paul learns a valuable lesson… leaving sixteen in which he has to serve as a voice of reason to the childish neighbor boy. And, criminy, if the show had been about Winnie? I just said that her role on the show is limited to that of the generic girlfriend, but to a certain extent that’s because we’re seeing her through Kevin’s eyes, and that’s what limits her. On the first episode of the show, her brother dies! The next season, her parents split up! In between, she discovers that trading her granny glasses for fishnets and go-go boots has abruptly made her popular, and very quickly has to learn how to juggle the insistent attentions of boys. Sure, there’s something to be said for the oblique approach—the notion that it is more deft to hint at Winnie’s grief and confusion through the eyes of a concerned bystander than to tackle it head-on. But… c’mon. Every time we get a chance to see Winnie from an angle other than Kevin’s, we learn something about her that he’s been oblivious to for all these years: that she likes Greek mythology, or that she wants to major in art history, or that her math skills are strong enough to get her thinking about the Ivy League, or that she’s a good enough swimmer to get hired as a lifeguard. It’s hard not to think that the creators wasted a lot of their potential material by making their show about the boy instead of the girl. (Apparently Marvel had the same thought about Gwen Stacy, which is why we now have a million series fleshing out a character whose story, like Winnie’s, was originally cut short in 1973.)
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