The Wonder Years

[Bob Blaylock]

being redone as a Black vehicle?

Has Hollywood COMPLETELY ran out of ideas?

'The Wonder Years' being rebooted with a Black family by ABC

Empire co-creator Lee Daniels reviving the classic series from a different perspective.

www.yahoo.com

But then, it will be the first time a black family has had their own series.





IF you ignore The Cosby Show, Different Strokes, Good Times, What's Happening, Sanford and Son, etc.

Thoughts?

The idea for a show like this could work, but I really cannot see it as a valid version of The Wonder Years. A very big point of The Wonder Years was to be about the memories of a very ordinary boy, growing up in a very ordinary suburban neighborhood, in the late 1960s to early 1970s, as remembered a few decades later by that same boy as an adult.

A similar black boy, presumably growing up in a black neighborhood, would have likely had very different experiences, which may well be worth depicting in a show with a similar treatment to that which The Wonder Years gave its protagonist's memories, but it would not be the same show.

I'm not opposed to making such a show, and I'd probably even watch it, but I don't think it should be called The Wonder Years, nor considered to be quite so connected with the original show. It'd be a completely different story, about a completely different boy, in a completely different subculture.

The Wonder Years was by far my favorite TV show, during the time that it originally ran. I very recently watched the whole series again on Hulu, and was reminded why I loved that show so much.

I was left with two gripes, that I have wished since then to have an appropriate medium in which to express.

The more minor one is about the episode Eclipse, in which Kevin and his classmates go on a field trip to an observatory, to see a solar eclipse. Along the way, one of his friends gets separated from the group at a restroom stop, and the bus leaves without him, and the episode covers some of this friend's misadventures hitchhiking the rest of the way to reunite with the group. The format of the show is as memories from the protagonist's point of view, as remembered a few decades later. He might remember that his friend vanished, at some point, and later showed up again with some crazy explanation as to what had happened, but he wouldn't have memories of the details of his friend's misadventures while separated from the group; so the depiction of these misadventures really felt out of place.


More significantly…

Spoiler

A major theme that permeates the entire series is Kevin's relationship with Winnie. As he struggles to unravel the mysteries of dating and romance and relationships of that sort, and all of that, Winnie is at the center of most of it. He occasionally breaks up with her, and dates other girls, but always, he goes back to Winnie. When he's in a relationship with any other girl, it's always clear that that relationship founders and fails because it is Winnie that he really should be with.

As stated near the end of the final episode, Independence Day…

“Once upon a time there was a girl I knew, who lived across the street. Brown hair, brown eyes. When she smiled, I smiled. When she cried, I cried. Every single thing that ever happened to me that mattered, in some way had to do with her. That day Winnie and I promised each other that no matter what, that we'd always be together. It was a promise full of passion and truth and wisdom. It was the kind of promise that can only come from the hearts of the very young.”​

And then, later, in the final narrative at the end of the episode…

“Winnie left the next summer to study art history in Paris. Still we never forgot our promise. We wrote to each other once a week for the next eight years. I was there to meet her, when she came home, with my wife and my first son, eight months old.”​

After all that we saw over the course of the series between them, after all his fumbling around in his relationship with Winnie, and with other girls, with whom those relationships failed because he was always meant to be with Winnie, I just cannot believe that this character could ever be content married to anyone else, as long as Winnie existed. As with every relationship he is ever shown having with any girl other than Winnie, I'd have to think that his marriage to anyone else would have to be shaky, and ultimately doomed to failure.