Look Back in Wonder: An Oral History of ‘The Wonder Years’
Though it’s been off the air for more than 20 years, The Wonder Years is one of those shows whose legacy has remained untarnished; you don’t hear many people looking back and saying it doesn’t hold up. Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous late Sixties, the ABC show focused on a suburban family — in particular, the growing pains of youngest son Kevin, played by Fred Savage. It may be the story’s universality that’s accounted for its ability to stand the test of time, or simply that, because the show only ran for six seasons and faded away before it burned out, the series retained a level of consistent quality throughout. Even its controversial 1993 finale, in which (spoiler alert) Kevin and Winnie part ways and a key character’s death is revealed, couldn’t dampen its long-term appeal.
It may not seem like it, but The Wonder Years was fairly unconventional for its time. For starters, the plot device of the narrator — a grown-up Kevin Arnold (voiced by Daniel Stern) looking back on his youth — was something brand new, as was the show’s single-camera format. Then there’s the fact that it was one of the first real pop-culture forces to capitalize on boomer nostalgia (The Big Chill notwithstanding). Children of the Sixties were only two decades or so removed from that period, and had just started looking back on the era; the series managed to do so without seeming schmaltzy or overly wistful.
Despite all this, the series has been mostly unavailable either on DVD or streaming services. Getting the rights to the music featured on the show (some 200 songs from artists like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Percy Sledge, not to mention Joe Cocker’s iconic cover of “With a Little Help From My Friends”) proved expensive and difficult, and the less said about reruns cursed with poorly-chosen cover versions, the better. But that’s all about to change: This month, Time-Life is releasing a massive DVD box set of the series, with the original songs included. In the wake of that, we caught up with some of the series’ major players to get an oral history of the show, warts and all.
In the Beginning…
Neal Marlens (co-creator, The Wonder Years): We [Marlens and co-creator Carol Black] had done a television series [Growing Pains], and I think we learned a great deal from it. We had what was called an overall deal at New World Television, so we were basically paid to sit there and think of projects that we wanted to do.
I think the [creative] impetus came from our personal experience of having come of age in a period when there was so much turmoil in the world; and yet, the experience of being a middle-class suburban kid really wasn’t that much different than it was five or 10 years earlier. It’s just that it was in a whole new context as you got older and as the implications of that started to get closer and closer to home. It kind of stirred things up in a way that seemed like a really interesting time.
We sat down and wrote the pilot, and then walked upstairs to John Feltheimer’s office and said, “We’ve written this pilot. We think it’ll work as a series. How should we sell it?” ABC — with whom we had a pre-existing relationship because we had a series there before — was the first to say, “We want to do this.” They were the only ones, actually.