The Wonder Years: Why the Remake Works

When it comes to reboots and remakes, most shows don’t make it out of their first season. The same thing can be said for movies with reboots of classic cinema.

Whether it’s recasting buddy-cop movies with female leads or The Wonder Years being remade from the experiences of an African American family, Hollywood has run out of ideas. Most of them don’t work, however, The Wonder Years remake does for various reasons:

Familiar Faces (And Voices), But Not Too Star-Studded

It would be simple for the show to go out and get the most recognizable faces in Hollywood and put them on your screen hoping for success.

Throwing too many heavy hitters and they command too much screen time taking away from other character story arcs. The Wonder Years has a good mix of both familiar and fresh faces so the chemistry and concern for each character are equally distributed.

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It Celebrates Culture, Not Stereotypes

This is the most important characteristic of The Wonder Years. So many shows change the lead character from one race to a different one in order to pull in a larger audience. The problem usually starts when the characters they create become caricatures of stereotypes from the races they portray.

More often than not, it alienates their audience. The Wonder Years avoids this hiccup by showing off cultural differences that feel natural to the characters involved. They don’t highlight it and smack you in the face with it. The differences are subtle yet relatable all while showing a different point of view of the world most remember.

Familiar Feel

The remake isn’t an exact copy of the original The Wonder Years. However, it’s close enough for the original show lovers. It might be missing its Winnie Cooper, When A Man Loves A Woman moment, but the coming-of-age moments between Dean and his father are there. I’m sure there will be plenty of drama and love interests along the way. There’s no sense in rushing into them and ruining character development. The 2021 iteration of The Wonder Years has more competition than the original. Because of streaming, it has to be more selective in how the story is told.

The new iteration of The Wonder Years has promise. Let’s see if it can survive past the first season.