The Wonder Years: A Recap

If you are unfamiliar with this program for some reason, The Wonder Years was a 30-minute comedy/drama that ran on ABC from 1988–1993.

The series opens in 1968, when protagonist Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) is starting junior high. Throughout the series, Kevin’s personal coming-of-age story runs parallel with America’s very different, public coming-of-age story.

As Kevin becomes more of an adult, America is also coming to terms with a new kind of adulthood: Vietnam, second-wave feminism, the Black Power movement, hippies, free love, a man on the moon. You get the picture.

In episode 4, “Angel,” Kevin’s older sister, Karen (Olivia D’Abo), introduces the family to her radical boyfriend, Louis (played by a very young, very handsome John Corbett). Kevin takes an instant dislike to Louis because he makes out with his sister on his parents’ lawn (gross!) and because, as Kevin’s voiceover explains, “I don’t know what it was about Louis that I didn’t like. Guess there was something about him I didn’t understand.”

Here we catch a glimpse of Louis’ spray-painted VW van, with the words Somethings Happening scrawled on the door. To Kevin, those words were ciphers, shorthand for a movement that he was too young to comprehend. Louis and his leather vest and VW van were something, to use Kevin’s words “that [were]…taking my sister away from us.”

Karen, the hippie. Image: Pinterest.

When I watched this episode at age 12, those words were also meaningless to me. A spray-painted van and long hair signified “hippie,” but I didn’t actually know what a hippie was. To me, “hippie” was a costume worn at Halloween rather than a representative of a political movement.

What I didn’t know then is that in 1968, a younger generation was beginning to question the way the world worked. They saw their parents as sleep walkers, as drones who had yet to be enlightened about “what’s going on.”

For example, in the same episode, Louis has dinner with Kevin and the rest of the Arnold family. When Norma (Alley Mills), Kevin’s mother, mentions that the son of a family friend was recently killed in Vietnam, a heated conversation ensues. Start at 14:30.

Start at 14:30.

When I watched this scene in 1988, I don’t think I understood the nuances of the argument. I saw it much the same way that Kevin sees it: one more fight in a long string of fights he has witnessed between his sister and his parents.

But when my husband and I recently rewatched The Wonder Years on Netflix, I was struck by the honesty of this scene.

It would have been easy to make Jack an out-of-touch defender of the old guard holding on to his ideals, even as he sees them crumbling around him. Yet, Jack is sympathetic here and so is his point of view. He fought in Korea. He served his country. Now he is enjoying his reward (or trying to): a comfortable home in the suburbs with his wife and children.

When Louis, who could also come off as a radical caricature but doesn’t, begins to poke holes in Jack’s worldview, there is a sadness there. Louis is not enjoying this argument. You can feel that Louis is angry, which we expect, but what I love about this scene is that it also legitimizes Jack’s anger.

When he snaps, “What do you know about it?! Who the hell are you to say that?!” you can feel the rage and betrayal of Jack’s generation. How does this hippie know anything about the way the world works? Where is his authority to speak? And why is his hair so damn long?

This scene was just one of many that has resonated with me in new ways since I began rewatching The Wonder Years, some 24 years after it first aired. This experience has resulted in a doubled viewing position.

My Doubled Viewing Position

On the one hand, I am watching as a 35-year-old and so the historical and cultural touchstones that I missed when I was 12 — the changing meaning of the suburbs in America in the 1960s, the anti-war movement, the student protests of 1968, The Feminine Mystique — are suddenly visible and significant.

But at the same time, as I watch, I am still watching as a 12 year old.

When I sat down to watch the pilot episode on Netflix, and the opening credits began to play, I felt crushed — not by nostalgia, but by the weight of being 12. Those credits, a faux-scratchy home movie of Kevin Arnold and his family enjoying their last days of innocence, were etched onto my brain so that each frame was a surprise and a memory.

This experience was like reliving entire pieces of my adolescence (complete with the attendant emotions) while simultaneously having the ability to contemplate these pieces of my youth from the detached perspective of an adult.

When I was 12 I so strongly identified with Kevin Arnold that when Winnie Cooper walks up to the bus stop in the pilot episode, having shed her pigtails and glasses for pink fishnet stockings and white go-go boots, I too, fell madly in love with her.

Even at 35 I was hit by that excruciating longing and terror so characteristic of 12-year-old desire. I was in the past and the present at the same time.