The Wonder Years

Did You Know?

• In 1990, a book titled The Wonder Years - Growing Up in the Sixties by Edward Gross was published, containing interviews and an episode guide.
• A Colombian version titled Los años maravillosos, set in the 1980s, was produced for Caracol Televisión and was a critical failure.
• In 2021, ABC rebooted the series focusing on a black middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama, with Don Cheadle as narrator.

Plot

The show follows Kevin Arnold, a boy growing up in a typical American middle-class suburban home, from 1968 to 1973, when he is between twelve and seventeen. The Arnold family’s exact suburb is never named, though license plates in some episodes point to California and New York. Each season of the series is set exactly twenty years before it aired, from 1988 to 1993. Kevin lives with his father Jack, a manager at the defense contractor NORCOM, his mother Norma, a housewife, his older brother Wayne, and his older sister Karen.

The stories are narrated by an adult Kevin in his mid-thirties, voiced by Daniel Stern. In the first episode, Winnie Cooper’s older brother Brian, whom Kevin admires, is killed in Vietnam in 1968. Kevin and Winnie share what seems to be their first kiss in a wooded area called Harpers Woods. Their relationship stays quiet for a while; Winnie dates a popular eighth-grader named Kirk McCray, and Kevin briefly goes steady with Becky Slater.

When Kevin breaks up with Becky because of his feelings for Winnie, Becky becomes a recurring annoyance. Winnie later breaks up with Kirk, and Kevin and Winnie share a second kiss at the start of summer 1969. Around Valentine’s Day 1970, Winnie briefly dates Paul, who has just broken up with his girlfriend Carla. Soon after, Winnie and Kevin start dating.

Just before summer break, Winnie’s family moves four miles away, and she attends Lincoln Junior High. They try a long-distance relationship, but Winnie breaks up with Kevin after meeting a jock named Roger. Neither relationship lasts, but they get back together after Winnie is hurt in a car crash. After junior high, Kevin and Winnie both go to McKinley High, while Paul attends a prep school before eventually transferring to McKinley High.

Cast

Kevin Arnold, born March 18, 1956, is played by Fred Savage. The voice of Kevin as an adult and the show's narrator is supplied by Daniel Stern, with Arye Gross providing the voice in the original broadcast of the pilot. Jack is a gruff, laconic Korean War veteran who grew up during the Great Depression and served in the US Marine Corps as a First Lieutenant. He works at NORCOM in a middle management position he loathes, later starting his own handcrafted furniture business.

The series' last episode reveals he dies in 1975 near the end of Kevin's freshman year of college. Jack represents the Silent Generation, confused and angered by the rapid changes of the 1960s, and is described as a Republican who voted for Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Norma Arnold, born March 22, 1930, is played by Alley Mills. She is Kevin's housewife mother, friendly and upbeat, and tries to be a peacekeeper in family clashes.

She met Jack as a college freshman and moved across the country with him without finishing college. She eventually earns her degree late in the series and begins work at a software startup called Micro Electronics. She is less conservative than her husband and increasingly yearns to break out of her homemaker role, reflecting the rise of feminism. Karen Arnold, born circa 1952, is played by Olivia d'Abo.

She is Kevin's hippie but mature older sister, whose free-spirited ways clash with her father's conservatism. When she moves in with her boyfriend Michael during her freshman year of college, she has a falling out with her father. The pair marry one year later and move to Alaska, where Michael has secured a good job. Karen ultimately accepts some of her parents' viewpoints and has a baby.

Production

The series was conceived by writers Neal Marlens and Carol Black, both of Growing Pains fame. They set out to create a family show appealing to the baby-boomer generation by setting it in the late 1960s, a time of radical change in America, and tying this setting to the life of a normal boy growing up. After writing the pilot script, they pitched the series to television networks; only ABC was interested. Marlens originally wanted the setting to be Huntington, Long Island, where he grew up, with elements also taken from Black's childhood in Silver Spring, Maryland.

ABC insisted the location remain nonspecific, but several items refer to Southern California, including car license plates, lack of snow, Jack working for a major defense contractor, and Wayne's driver's license listing Culver City, California. When starting the series, Marlens and Black took a script for a future film featuring an off-screen narrator. Black explained they liked the concept of playing with what people think and what they say versus how the audience sees them.

They based the show partly on their own childhoods in the suburbs. The show's title was a satirical nod to a 1970s Wonder Bread ad campaign promoting white bread as perfect for The Wonder Years, ages 1 through 12.

Release

The show's syndicated rerun run lasted from September 1992 to September 1997. After that, Nick at Nite picked it up from October 1997 to January 2001. It then moved to The New TNN for about eight months in 2001, followed by a stint on ABC Family from late 2001 to late 2004. Ion Television aired it for six months in 2007, and The Hub carried it from October 2010 to August 2012.

Across the Atlantic, Channel 4 in the UK began broadcasting it in August 1989. In West Germany, RTL plus started airing the first four seasons under the title Wunderbare Jahre in February 1990, showing them on Saturdays at 6:00 pm until February 1992. Reruns later appeared on RTL 2 in 1993 and 1994, and then the network aired the show again on weekdays from July to December 1995, finally presenting the previously unseen fifth and sixth seasons between October and December of that year.

Canadian viewers could catch it on CTS Ontario from September 2010 to September 2011. In Australia, Network Ten carried it from 1989 to 1995, and ABC1 revived it in March 2012. The Philippines saw it on GMA Network. Spain's TVE2 initially ran it on Monday nights at 9:30 pm as part of a comedy block, later moving it to the main TVE1 channel for Friday 9:00 pm broadcasts.

In the late 1990s, Antena 3TV brought it back, first in a 2:00 pm comedy slot and then at 5:30 pm within the youth program La Merienda. Home video releases were limited. Anchor Bay put out the first four episodes on two VHS tapes in 1997, keeping most of the original music, but high licensing fees stopped further VHS releases. Those same two volumes came out on DVD in 2000.

Two best-of DVD sets, including four episodes total, were also released but lacked much of the original soundtrack. Because of ongoing music rights issues, complete seasons never made it to DVD, and the series regularly appeared on lists of most-wanted TV shows for that format.