From Executive Producer Fred Savage, who played Kevin Arnold on the original series, comes the African American re-imagining of The Wonder Year which premiered on ABC last night. The show basically follows the premise of the original show, following the cavity-prone years of a kid growing up in 1968, with the adult version of the character serving as the show's narrator. At this point, I should mention that I don't think I ever watched a complete episode of the original series, but because I'm black and because II was only a little younger than the lead in this version when this is set, my curiosity was naturally piqued. Obviously, the difference between this reboot and the original is that racism is probably going to be at the forefront of a lot of the episodes because racism was at its zenith in 1968. There's some clever appreciation of black slang in the writing...loved the running gag based on the phrase "Stay out of grown folks' business." But the story of the black little league team playing a white team for the first time just wasn't that interesting and the battle between Coach Long (Allan Maldonado) and Dean's dad (Dule Hill) was just silly and the segue to the pretentious conclusion revolving around Martin Luther King's assassination was a little convenient. Right now, this show is a nice idea, but nothing special. The writers need to put a little more work into Don Cheadle's narration, which isn't sure if it wants to duplicate Daniel Stern in the original or be more like Chris Rock's narration in Everybody Hates Chris. Dule Hill is excellent as the dad, but other than that, the cast is nothing special, but I'm willing to give it a couple more episodes.
Last edited by Gideon58; 09-23-21 at 12:48 PM.