Historian Daniel Marcus, in a beautiful 2004 book entitled Happy days and wonder years, compared the different use of nostalgic discourse put in place by the US right and left: simplifying a lot, the former has always referred to the “happy days” of the 1950s, idealized as the last age of collective innocence, of national unity and familiar, common sense; the second, on the other hand, has more often appealed to the “prodigious” 60s, cleansed of the most revolutionary trends, as an expression of the youthful impulse aimed at creating a better world. If Reagan and Clinton, respectively, are the epitome of the two narratives in politics, on TV the first is (obviously) embodied by Happy Days, the second from The wonder years, a series that aired in ’88 and set in ’68, much loved in the United States and (little) known in Italy with the title of Blue jeans. A thousand differences could be detected between the two, but at least one is basic: Happy days it’s a sort of theme park, where everything hibernates over time; The wonder years instead it begins with the news of a boy who died in Vietnam and has maturation as the main topic. The first is therefore one comedy pure, the second was one of the first dramedy successfull.
The reboot from The wonder years (on Disney + from December 22), therefore, is a rather interesting case, in theory supported by a double level of nostalgia: for the 88 series and for the 1960s in which it is set. As in the original, the protagonist is a 12-year-old boy, Dean Willams, whose stories are now commented with irony, now with moving participation by the narrator of his now adult and mature version. But Dean is black, while the Kevin of the original was white: in this change essentially lies the whole meaning of the operation, which allows us to reread those years in the light of a profoundly different and at the same profoundly similar experience. The writing is brilliant enough to forgive moments of excessive saccharin, but the main point, it seems to me, is precisely this attempt to bring the differences together.
The wonder years
Saladin K. Patterson
Disney +, starting December 22