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1980s American comedy drama television series (1988–1993)
the 1988 American television series

The Wonder Years is an American coming of age comedy television series created by Neal Marlens and Carol Black. It ran on ABC from January 31, 1988, until May 12, 1993. The series premiered immediately after ABC's coverage of Super Bowl XXII. The series stars Fred Savage as Kevin Arnold, a teenager growing up in a suburban middle class family in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It co stars Dan Lauria as his father Jack, Alley Mills as his mother Norma, Jason Hervey as his brother Wayne, Olivia d'Abo as his sister Karen, Josh Saviano as his best friend Paul Pfeiffer, and Danica McKellar as his girlfriend Winnie Cooper, with narration by Daniel Stern as an adult version of Kevin. The show earned a spot in the Nielsen Top 30 during its first four seasons. TV Guide named it one of the 20 best shows of the 1980s. In total, the series won 22 awards and was nominated for 54 more. In 1997, "My Father's Office" was ranked number 29 on TV Guides 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time, and in the 2009 revised list, the pilot episode was ranked number 43. In 2016, Rolling Stone ranked The Wonder Years number 63 on its list of 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2017, James Charisma of Paste ranked the show's opening sequence number 14 on a list of the 75 Best TV Title Sequences of All Time. As of recent years, many critics and fans consider The Wonder Years to be a classic with tremendous impact on the industry over the years, inspiring many other shows and how they are structured.

The series depicts the social and family life of a boy in a stereotypical American suburban middle class family from 1968 to 1973, covering the ages of 12 through 17. Where the Arnold family lives is never specified other than being a suburb, but some episodes have license plates showing California and New York. Each year in the series takes place exactly 20 years before airing (1988 to 1993). The show's plot centers on Kevin Arnold, son of Jack and Norma Arnold. Kevin's father holds a management job at NORCOM, a defense contractor, while his mother is a housewife. Kevin also has an older brother, Wayne, and an older sister, Karen. Two of Kevin's friends and neighbors are prominently featured throughout the series: his best friend, Paul Pfeiffer, and his crush turned girlfriend Gwendolyn "Winnie" Cooper. Storylines are told through Kevin's reflections as an adult in his mid 30s, voiced by Daniel Stern. In the pilot episode, Winnie's older brother Brian, whom Kevin admires, is killed in action in Vietnam in 1968. Kevin meets Winnie in a nearby wooded area called Harpers Woods, and they share what is implied to be each other's first kiss. This unsaid relationship between Winnie and Kevin remains dormant for a long while, with Winnie starting to date a popular eighth grader named Kirk McCray and Kevin briefly going steady with Becky Slater. After Kevin breaks up with Becky due to his feelings for Winnie, Becky becomes a recurring nuisance for Kevin. Winnie eventually dumps Kirk, as well, and Kevin and Winnie share a second kiss at the start of the 1969 summer vacation. Around Valentine's Day 1970, Winnie temporarily dates Paul, who has broken up with his girlfriend Carla. Winnie and Kevin start dating each other soon after. Just before the summer break, Winnie and her family move to a house four miles away. Although Winnie attends a new school, Lincoln Junior High, she and Kevin decide to remain together and maintain a successful long distance relationship. A beautiful new student named Madeline Adams joins Kevin's school and quickly catches Kevin's eye, but it is Winnie who breaks up with Kevin after meeting Roger, a jock at her new school. Neither relationship lasts long, but Winnie and Kevin don't reunite until she is injured in a car crash. After graduating from junior high, Kevin and Winnie both go to McKinley High and Paul attends a prep school. Paul would later transfer to McKinley High and join Kevin and Winnie. Earlier seasons of the show tended to focus on plots involving events within the Arnold household and Kevin's academic struggles, whereas later seasons focused much more on plots involving dating and Kevin's friends. Kevin has several brief flings during the summer of 1971 and the 1971–1972 academic year. After Kevin's grandfather gets his driver's license revoked, he sells his car to Kevin for a dollar. Paul transfers to McKinley High after his first semester at preparatory school when his father runs into financial troubles. Wayne decides to join the army as a result of his inability to do well in school. This gets turned around when Wayne is not able to pass his physical. Winnie and Kevin are reunited when they go on a double date to a school dance, and find themselves more attracted to each other than their respective partners. In late 1972, Kevin's older brother Wayne starts working at NORCOM, and dates his co worker Bonnie, a divorcée with a son, but the relationship does not last. Kevin's father quits NORCOM, and buys a furniture manufacturing business.

Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage): Character born March 18, 1956, Kevin grew up in the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s. The voice of Kevin as an adult (and the show's narrator) is supplied by Daniel Stern (Arye Gross in the original broadcast of the pilot). John "Jack" Arnold (Dan Lauria): Character born on November 6, 1927, died in 1975. Kevin's father was a gruff, laconic man and a Korean War veteran; he grew up during the Great Depression, served in the US Marine Corps, and is seen in photographs wearing the uniform of a First Lieutenant. He works at NORCOM, a large military defense corporation, in a middle management position he loathes. Later, he starts his own business, building and selling handcrafted furniture. The series's last episode reveals that he dies in 1975 near the end of Kevin's freshman year of college – that is, two years after the time of the show's finale – although in a previous episode, an adult Kevin says his father would later be the grandfather of Kevin's sons. Jack represents the viewpoint of the "Silent Generation" that grew up during the Depression and came of age during the Second World War; it was confused and angered by the rapid changes taking place in the 1960s. He is described as a Republican who voted for Richard Nixon twice in the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972. Norma Arnold (née Gustavson) (Alley Mills): Character born March 22, 1930, Kevin's housewife mother. Unlike her husband, Norma is friendly and upbeat. She met Jack as a college freshman. When he graduated, she moved across the country with him and did not finish college. She eventually gets her degree late in the series and begins work at a software startup called Micro Electronics. Although she came of age at the same time as her husband, she is less conservative than her husband and increasingly yearns to break out of her homemaker role, reflecting the rise of feminism in the 1960s. Karen Arnold (Olivia d'Abo): Character born circa 1952, Kevin's hippie, but mature older sister. Her free spirited ways clash with her overbearing father's conservatism, and she depends upon her mother as a mediator. When Karen moves in with her boyfriend Michael (David Schwimmer) 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, while her husband learns to support his wife and child. Wayne Arnold (Jason Hervey): Character born April 6, 1954, Kevin's annoying older brother. Wayne enjoys physically tormenting Kevin and Paul, calling Kevin "butthead" or "scrote". He ultimately takes over the family furniture business, after his father died. (Wayne attempted to follow in Jack's footsteps by joining the military, but psoriasis kept him out.) Wayne is usually portrayed as a loser in romantic relationships. For a time, he dated a girl named Dolores, but that was more casual than serious. In later seasons, Wayne matures. In the final season, he begins a serious relationship with a divorcée named Bonnie, but is left heartbroken when she reconciles with her husband. Paul Joshua Pfeiffer (Josh Saviano): Character born March 14, 1956, Paul is Kevin's long time best friend, a bright and excellent student, and an allergy sufferer. He is also Jewish and in one episode celebrates his Bar Mitzvah. Although Kevin and Paul are best friends in the series's early seasons, their relationship becomes somewhat strained later. Kevin begins to spend more time with Chuck and Jeff, causing tension with Paul. Paul also attends a private prep school for one season, leaving Kevin alone to start public high school. In another episode, Kevin is frustrated and conflicted with Paul after the latter loses his virginity before him. In the final episode, it is revealed that Paul eventually attends Harvard and becomes a lawyer (in real life, Saviano quit acting, went to Yale, and became a lawyer). Gwendolyn "Winnie" Cooper (Danica McKellar): Winnie is Kevin's main love interest and neighbor. Her older brother's death in the Vietnam War plays a big part in the pilot. In another episode, Winnie's parents separate in grief over the death of their son. In the epilogue of the final episode, Winnie travels overseas to study art history in Paris. Kevin and Winnie write to each other every week for eight years until she returns; in the concluding moments of the finale, Kevin says that when Winnie returned to the States, Kevin met her accompanied by his wife and first child, despite the hope among Wonder Years fans that Kevin and Winnie would themselves marry. Kevin says at the end, "things never turn out exactly the way you plan them." As suggested in an episode entitled "The Accident" and in the final episode of the series, every important event in Kevin's life has somehow involved Winnie.

The series was conceived by writers Neal Marlens and Carol Black, both of Growing Pains fame. They set out to create a family show that would appeal to the baby boomer generation by setting the series in the late '60s, a time of radical change in America's history. They also wanted the series to tie this setting in to the life of a normal boy growing up during the period. After writing the script for the pilot episode, Marlens and Black began pitching the series to television networks. None of them were interested, except for ABC, with whom Marlens and Black reached an agreement. Marlens had originally wanted the setting to be Huntington, Long Island, where he grew up. Elements were also taken from Black's childhood from the White Oak section of Silver Spring, Maryland. ABC, however, insisted that the location remain nonspecific (the colloquial "Anytown, USA"), but several items refer to the setting as Southern California, from car license plates to Wayne's driver's license listing Culver City, California.

When they started writing the series, Marlens and Black took a script for a future film with which they had been toying, which featured an off screen narrator. Black explained, "We liked the concept that you could play with what people think and what they're saying, or how they would like to see themselves as opposed to how the audience is seeing them." They based the show, in part, on their own childhood growing up in the suburbs. Black recalled that "we naturally [took] elements of our experience and [threw] them into the pot. The basic setup, the neighborhood, the era – that's the time and place where we grew up."

The search for the main lead of the show did not take long. Marlens and Black went to five casting directors and interviewed them for recommendations. All five of them recommended Fred Savage, who at the time was famous for his roles as the grandson in The Princess Bride and as Charlie/Marshall in Vice Versa. Marlens and Black, having never heard of Savage, decided to see the rough cut of Vice Versa. Said Marlens, "[We saw] a marvelous actor with a natural quality – which essentially means he has no quality at all except being a kid. It sounds funny, but it's a rare thing to find in a child actor." Marlens and Black took this approach when casting the other kids for the show, looking for natural ability rather than professionalism. According to Marlens, they saw 300 to 400 kids before narrowing it down to 70. "My wife and I made the final choice each of whom had to be approved by the network." For the choice of Savage's character's main love interest, the choice came down to actress Danica McKellar and her sister, Crystal McKellar. With just days to go before shooting, the producers eventually selected Danica to play Winnie Cooper. However, Mary Buck, the head of casting, noted, "it was practically a tossup". Crystal McKellar was liked so much by the producers that they eventually created the character of Becky Slater so that they could have her on the show. Danica later reflected on the experience, "I auditioned, like everyone else. They had read lots of girls but hadn't found their 'Winnie' yet, and I was thrilled to be chosen."

At the end of the first season, Marlens and Black departed from the show. Although they never gave a reason for their sudden departure, it may have been due to Black's pregnancy. She hinted at it in an interview in April 1988, saying "We have secret plans to leave Los Angeles before our kids reach the age of cognizance." Many exterior shots were filmed in Burbank, California.

Three different versions of the opening were made, each set to the Joe Cocker rendition of "With a Little Help from My Friends".

This first version of the opening was very basic: Nothing but a black screen was shown, after the title logo, with each cast member's name appearing in the center one by one. Much like the Arye Gross narration, this version of the opening was only used once when the pilot first aired after Super Bowl XXII.

This opening consists of home movie footage from the pilot, after the title logo is shown, ending with the "Created by" credit. In season five, more footage is added to show how much the cast has aged.

The opening was overhauled completely in this version. It consisted of stock footage and images of various moments throughout 1960s and early 1970s culture (i. e. John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bed in, the Kent State shootings, the Moon Landing, and an antiwar protest), and was set to a new edit of Cocker's rendition of the song (starting with the chorus, versus the opening of the song, as was the case in seasons one through five). The final image in this version is of Kevin, Paul, Winnie, and presumably some of their classmates in a group photograph edited to look like it belonged in the time period.

The official soundtrack released in 1988 by Atlantic/WEA contains a total of 13 tracks, featuring Joe Cocker's cover of The Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends", which is the show's theme song. After the series' original run was over, Laserlight Digital released a five disc compilation box set under the title Music from 'The Wonder Years in 1994. This same company later released the first two DVDs for the series, The Best of The Wonder Years and The Christmas Wonder Years. The disc included 40 oldies favorites and five original songs (each is repeated twice in the set) written exclusively for the series by W. G. Snuffy Walden. In 2014, Time Life released a new soundtrack for the show that accompanies deluxe versions of its complete series DVD set. The CD is not available for purchase separately from the DVD box set, however.

The Time Life DVD releases feature around 96% of the original music soundtrack, including Joe Cocker's cover of "With a Little Help From My Friends" at the opening. Fourteen songs were replaced, in most instances featuring generic studio replacement music in place of the original song, while on a few occasions, the original soundtrack song was replaced with another version of the same song. None of the necessary music replacements resulted in footage from the episodes being removed. In the episode "The Phone Call", the "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet" was replaced with a song called "Star Crossed Lovers", which has been used in many other TV shows and movies, including The Brady Bunch. In "Dance With Me", Joe Cocker's cover of "The Letter" was replaced with the original version by The Box Tops, while the Herman's Hermits version of "There's a Kind of Hush" was replaced with a rerecording by the Craggy Blue Project. The episode "Heart of Darkness" had two replacements: "Riders on the Storm" by The Doors was replaced with "Children of the Night", while Richie Havens' cover of The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" was replaced by "Train to Nowhere". In the episode "Whose Woods Are These? ", the Blood, Sweat & Tears recording entitled "Variations on a Theme" by Erik Satie (1st and 2nd Movements, adapted from Satie's "Three Gymnopédies") was replaced with "Le Suenne Fite". The episode "How I Am Spending My Summer Vacation" replaced the Doors' "Light My Fire" with "Love's on Fire", while the episode "Summer Song" replaced Blood, Sweat and Tears' "Spinning Wheel" with a rerecording by former BS&T frontman David Clayton Thomas. In "Family Car", The Stills Young Band's "Long May You Run" was replaced with "Keep Your Motor Running". In "Wayne on Wheels", "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet" was again replaced by "Star Crossed Lovers". In the episode "The Treehouse", Doris Day's "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" was replaced with "Call the Whole Thing Off". In the episode "Little Debbie", "Tammy" by Liberace was replaced with a song called "Sammy". "Clip Show" contains the scene from "Heart of Darkness" in which "Here Comes the Sun" is replaced with "Train to Nowhere". The episode "Kevin Delivers" dropped Blood, Sweat and Tears' "You've Made Me So Very Happy" with a re recording by David Clayton Thomas. In the episode "Alice in Autoland", Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" was replaced with a re recording by him. In the final episode "Independence Day", the Ennio Morricone song "Brothers" from the 1986 motion picture The Mission, which was played over the pivotal barn scene featuring Kevin and Winnie's last kiss, was replaced with the generic tune "Pastorale" (for this instance alone, the same replacement was used in the 1998 The Best of The Wonder Years DVD release). Also, not a music change per se, but the Daniel Stern redub of the pilot is used, with the standard opening sequence. Other than the above music changes, all other music is intact. The UK DVD release from Fabulous Films was intended to have no replaced music, but reviews on online retailers and fan websites show that this is not the case. Fans were somewhat disappointed with the ending, in particular the revelation that Kevin and Winnie do not end up as a couple. Brush acknowledged this disappointment, saying, "Some viewers [were] surprised that nothing works out the way your fondest wish would be," and explained, "The message I wanted in there is that that's part of the beauty of life. It's fine to say, 'I'd like everything to be just the way it was when I was 15 and I was happy,' but it seemed more nurturing to me to say that we leave these things behind and we go on to forge new lives for ourselves."

As the show was in the process of wrapping its final season, a costume designer on the show named Monique Long filed a sexual harassment charge against stars Fred Savage and Jason Hervey. The suit brought forward unwanted publicity to the show. In the end, the case was settled out of court with Savage stating that he was "completely exonerated" and adding that it was a "terrible experience". In January 2018, Alley Mills said that a sexual harassment lawsuit against Savage and Hervey was a significant factor in the show's cancellation.

Reruns of the show aired in syndication between September 1992 and September 1997. Nick at Nite then reran the show from October 13, 1997 to January 21, 2001. It also reran on The New TNN (January 22, 2001 to September 28, 2001), ABC Family (November 12, 2001 to October 2, 2004), Ion Television (April 2, 2007 to October 4, 2007), and The Hub (October 11, 2010 to August 31, 2012). In Canada, the show aired on CTS Ontario from September 2010 until September 2, 2011. In Australia, the show aired on Network Ten between 1989 and 1995, then from March 31, 2012, on ABC1. In the Philippines, the show aired on GMA Network. In Spain, the series initially aired Mondays 9:30 pm on TVE2 (now La2) as part of the Monday night comedy block, which also featured Murphy Brown. The series was later promoted to main channel TVE1, where it aired Fridays 9:00 pm. Years later, in the late '90s, commercial station Antena 3TV recovered the series and aired it first in its 2:00 pm comedy hour, later relocating it to a 5:30 pm slot as part of the youth macroshow La Merienda.

In Colombia, the production company BE TV made a version for Caracol Televisión also titled Los años maravillosos (The Wonder Years), set in the 1980s and with a Colombian cast. The series was a critical failure.

On July 8, 2020, ABC announced that they were rebooting the series with film director, producer, and screenwriter Lee Daniels, longtime television writer and producer Saladin Patterson, and original series star Fred Savage as executive producers. Savage would also direct the pilot episode, and original series co creator Neal Marlens will be a consultant on the project. The new series would once again take place in the late 1960s—but this time, it would focus on the life of a black middle class family living in Montgomery, Alabama. In March 2021, it was announced that Don Cheadle would serve as the series narrator. In May 2021, ABC officially picked up the series. The series premiered on September 22, 2021.