The Wonder Years

When ABC premiered The Wonder Years on January 31, 1988, right after Super Bowl XXII, the timing felt accidental but worked like a dream. Created by Neal Marlens and Carol Black, the show followed Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) through adolescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s — a suburban world the writers deliberately never named, making it feel like every suburb at once. In the pilot, his crush Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar) loses her older brother in Vietnam, and Kevin shares a first kiss with her in Harpers Woods; his best friend Paul Pfeiffer (Josh Saviano) and his family — Dan Lauria and Alley Mills as his parents, Jason Hervey as his brother Wayne — filled out the world. Daniel Stern's narration as an older Kevin gave the whole thing a bittersweet frame: you were always looking backward even as you watched it happen.

The show caught fire instantly. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1988 with only six episodes aired, and the following year 13-year-old Fred Savage became the youngest-ever nominee for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy. Each season was set exactly twenty years before it aired, so the era's details had real weight. For five years — 115 episodes through May 1993 — the show stayed true to that nostalgic melancholy, and Joe Cocker's rendition of "With a Little Help from My Friends" opened every episode like a sigh.

The finale did something few sitcom finales dared: it denied you the happy ending. Adult Kevin's narration revealed that he and Winnie didn't end up together — she went to Paris to study art history — and that his father died in 1975, with his brother taking over the family furniture business. The show ended not with a punchline but with a little boy's voice — Stern's real-life son — asking, "Hey, Dad, want to play catch?" TV Guide later ranked "My Father's Office" #29 on its list of the 100 greatest episodes ever, with the pilot itself joining the 2009 revision — fitting for the show that made nostalgia itself into a genre.