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THE WONDER YEARS original US TX: Monday 05/08/91 reviewed by Ian Jones |
September
2000
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As a convincing recreation of the turbulence of adolescence, no American TV series comes close to The Wonder Years. The programme followed the life of teenager Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) growing up in US suburbia in the late '60s/early '70s, and ran for five years showing in this country on Sunday nights on Channel 4 from 1988. Each week Kevin, his thoughts narrated as if in retrospect by a voice-over speaking from a present-day perspective, balanced personal crises, family disputes, relationship problems and delicate friendships within the contemporary cultural climate of Richard Nixon's America. Out of many great episodes, the one I've picked, set in 1971, is maybe the most memorable and moving out of the whole series. It opens with Kevin at the end of his time at Robert F Kennedy Junior High School, something that fills him with heady exhilaration as he contemplates a future at High School amongst the real "grown-up" students. But his delight at being able once more to go to the same school as his on/off long-term girlfriend Winnie Cooper is immediately ruined by the discovery his best friend Paul Fyfer is leaving for a private prep school in another part of town. All three have been best mates and neighbours virtually all their lives - a trio of childhood friends, the kind of gang you have to grow out of before you realise how important an impact it had on your life. This upheaval forces Kevin to revisit his past and start wondering whether the passing of time isn't more of a bad, corruptive thing than a positive force. Kevin tries to get his head round what's going on - how one building, a soulless, regimental, unappealing block of concrete, which he's had to attend for the last few years of his life every weekday without fail, can end up meaning so much and representing so many good times. The episode moves with Kevin's thoughts through a series of contemplations, subtlety illuminating the significance of what it means to be leaving one school and starting another. Intensely annoyed with how he thinks Paul is somehow betraying him by moving to another school the pair have an ill-tempered furious row, the kind best friends need to have every so often, which results in them - temporarily at least - falling out big style. Kevin then finds himself in an imaginative, if unlikely situation: driving to hospital with his ex-English teacher who's just gone into labour. Only he's never driven a car properly before, he's dressed up in his best suit ostensibly on his way to his graduation (where his parents are waiting), and he's motoring a vehicle he's not licensed to drive along decidedly bumpy roads with a woman screaming in pain in the passenger seat next to him. This momentarily puts all his thoughts of leaving school out of his mind - the voice-over humorously relates how he (Kevin) was not so much concerned with becoming a High School student, but more of becoming a de-facto father. After an amusing scene of Kevin as the clichéd anxious-father-to-be-pacing-the-waiting-room, it's only when he's holding the newly-born baby does he realise how his grudges against Paul, plus his shifting, ambivalent feelings about growing older, can change perspective in a matter of minutes. Back at school he hears Paul, who has been chosen to give a graduation address on behalf of the students, talking about just the same fears Kevin's been grappling with: how time passing disrupts routines and how even the most mundane aspects of suburban living become the most important when they're threatened with change. Realising he's not alone in his anxieties, Kevin and Paul enjoy a reconciliation - but Kevin's root concerns remain unresolved, and Paul doesn't change his mind over going to prep school, meaning Kevin loses his best friend. He looks for the signs and comforts in the streets and places he has grown up in, but can't find them anymore. Panicking, he pleads - what's going on? The story strikes just the right balance between mawkish romanticising and blunt realism, with plenty of wise humour too, and Fred Savage's acting is flawless. It tackles a point in everyone's life - a change of schools - by emphasising the universal doubts and feelings it provokes; Kevin is like us, the ordinary, everyday teenager, who looks and speaks (unlike in, say, Dawson's Creek or Beverley Hills 90210) like a real 15-year-old. He has no answers (how can he when he's only in his mid-teens?) so he can't offer us any answers. And most importantly (and here's where the programme really triumphs) he doesn't preach some moralistic conclusion for the viewer to choke on. The episode depicts an affecting, engaging, recognisable world where people face problems that can't be solved with a bit of moody philosophising and a walk in the sun. It's not somewhere that is populated by unbelievably articulate upstarts who swan around picturesque sparkling semi-rural paradises, mouthing dry platitudes and contrived linguistic analyses - quite the reverse. Kevin's our hero, he's one of us, he let's us feel what he feels, and so in the end helps us stumble on through life and realise the past is ultimately somewhere you should not, can not, live in forever. |
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