#THE WONDER YEARS NARRATOR TV#

Patterson, is emphatic that this is not a bad-old-days story. The sweetly funny pilot, written by Saladin K. Instead, it also begins in 1968, which the narrator (Don Cheadle, as the adult Dean) introduces as a year when there was a pandemic, Black parents gave their kids “the police talk” and “a presidential election that had created a racial divide.” If this “Wonder Years” had turned the clock back the same amount as the original, it would be set in 2001. The focus is Dean Williams (Elisha Williams), an awkward 12-year-old growing up in Montgomery, Ala. And how comfortably you revisit the past depends on whether you assume the past is friendly territory for someone like you.Īll this gives ABC’s new version of “The Wonder Years,” centered on a Black family, an immediate sense of purpose: to integrate TV’s Memory Lane, to complicate our idea of what nostalgia means, to show us what it looks like when someone else climbs in the time machine. Your relationship to history has very much to do with which side of history your ancestors were on. We didn’t start the fire!Ĭhildhood memories, of course, are not unique to any demographic group - you find them in works by Black artists from Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn” to Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish.” But it takes a certain kind of privilege to suggest that the larger world ever had an innocence to lose - that things were simpler and sweeter, once, before they turned bitter and complicated. To an audience that shared Kevin’s experience, it says: Sure, a lot of things started going wrong then, but we were just kids, figuring it all out. Near the end of the first episode, Kevin learns that his neighbor - the older brother of his long-running crush, Winnie Cooper - has been killed in Vietnam.īut the recurring theme, underlined by Daniel Stern’s voice-over, is that Kevin is learning about the larger world just as the larger world is learning unpleasant things about itself.

#THE WONDER YEARS NARRATOR TV#

Though “The Wonder Years” could be pat and heavy-handed (unpopular TV opinion alert), it was not Pollyannish about the old days.

The wonder years narrator