How To Watch Television

24. The Wonder Years: Televised Nostalgia

223 24 The Wonder Years Televised Nostalgia Daniel Marcus Abstract: One of the cultural functions of television is to serve as a site of social memory, constructing visions of the past for multiple generations. Daniel Marcus analyzes how the popular 1980s sitcom The Wonder Years remembers the 1960s, creating both nostalgia for and political commentary about a formative and controversial moment in American history. The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988–1993) recounts the adolescence of Kevin Arnold and his friends as they confront school bullies, early romance, and social tumult in middle-class suburbia of the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 The intermittently serious comedy was part of a reevaluation of “the Sixties” that occurred after the conservative electoral success of the Reagan era and its call for a return to “Fifties” values.2 The production was the first television series to find popularity by reaching back to the late 1960s as a historical touchstone and relied on viewers’ knowledge of events of that time in telling its stories. The Wonder Years can be seen as part of a generational effort to understand the relationship between two controversial eras in recent American history, the late 1960s and the 1980s, presented from the perspective of a fictional secondary participant in the social changes of the 1960s. Developing parallels between the shock of adolescence and the trauma of the Vietnam War and rapid social change, the shows brings these strands together in its portrayals of the generation gap and family loss. The vivid 1960s popular culture, however, also provides a context for personal experimentation and growth for its young characters. The series illustrates the various ways that entertainment media invoke, adapt, and organize memories and images of the past, creating fictional archives for public commemoration and discussion. By depicting private lives embroiled in the public issues of a controversial era, The Wonder Years uses nostalgia for childhood experiences to appeal 224 Daniel Marcus to key demographic groups, even as it universalizes situations specific to a time and place to forge a wider-ranging audience. By locating its story in early adolescence, the series can appeal to viewers whose childhood occurred during the depicted era, and to a younger generation of audience members grappling with issues of youth in the 1980s. This construction of a shared perspective on the Sixties as a time of adolescent development created a large enough audience to make The Wonder Years commercially viable, and its nostalgic framing defused some of the controversy surrounding highly charged historical events. The series’ sentimental, appreciative, and mainly comic vision of the era confronted more critical evaluations made by political and cultural conservatives. The perspective on the recent past asserted by the producers, shaped by industry needs, and affirmed by commercial popularity, competed to become the dominant cultural memory of the Sixties in American society. American culture experienced a succession of nostalgia waves beginning in the late 1960s. Nostalgia is an emotion triggered by a sense of loss from changes in location or the passage of time. In temporal nostalgia, feelings of longing are triggered by the impossibility of going back to the past, except through fantasies purveyed in entertainment or politics, or the consumption of unchanged media from the previous era. Fans of nostalgic entertainment wish to look back to previous eras for what they have since lost, either personally or as members of a group. Nostalgia can be for a particular period in one’s own life, such as early childhood or the senior year of high school, or for a historical period like the 1950s, or 1960s, or 1980s. Because these eras are documented in media and discussed through the recollections of participants, even individuals who were not alive during these times may want to “go back” to a previous era. When media productions invoke a nostalgia that speaks to both individual and collective loss or dislocation, they have the potential to have both deep and broad appeal.3 In the late 1960s, during a time widely perceived as experiencing rapid and sometimes traumatic social change, the youth counterculture embraced a re-appreciation for Fifties youth culture, from early rock and roll to such TV figures as Howdy Doody (a puppet who starred on a children’s show.) This renewed embrace of Fifties themes spread to other segments of society in the 1970s and found expression in films such as American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978), and the television series Happy Days (ABC, 1974–1984). With the ascendancy of Ronald...