One of the more pleasant surprises of the TV season just ending has been The Goldbergs, an ABC sitcom predicated on nostalgia for the late, great 1980s. I wasn’t sure about this one at first — the pilot episode was a queasy mismatch of mean-spirited snark and treacly sentiment that had just enough laughs to bring me back for another try. Fortunately, the showrunners saw the problem and modulated the yelling and sarcasm in later episodes, allowing the show to develop its own quirky flavor that’s a lot less Married… with Children and a lot more The Wonder Years.
The Goldbergs actually echoes The Wonder Years — that landmark coming-of-age series that ran in the late ’80s/early ’90s, but was set 20 years earlier — in a number of ways, which I suspect is probably intentional. Like The Wonder Years, the show is built around a family of five familiar archetypes: grumpy dad, kooky mom, moody older sister, bullying lunkhead middle brother, and cute youngest brother, who serves as the protagonist of most stories. The Goldbergs also adds a sixth character to the recipe, a swinging-single grandfather who is winningly played by veteran character actor George Segal.
There are other similarities to The Wonder Years, notably a voice-over narration supplied by an adult version of the youngest brother, as well as the show’s use of original music from the period to comment on and enhance the storylines. (The season ender last week deployed Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” in a way that was simply sublime. If any Gen-Xer watching that episode didn’t end up with a lump in their throat and a big old grin on their lips, they need to catch the first time-traveling DeLorean back to the ’80s and do it all over again.)
However, one big and very remarkable difference between The Goldbergs and The Wonder Years is the way they respectively handle time. While the latter show identified each season as representing a specific historical year, as well as a specific school year/grade level for its young protagonist, The Goldbergs takes a more… post-modern approach. We are informed in the voice-over each week that the show is set in a generalized “1980-something.” This gimmick — which I think is actually pretty funny — allows the producers to include familiar pop-cultural landmarks, fads, clothing styles, and news events from all over the decade without smart-alecks like me pointing out, for example, that there were five years between the release of The Goonies and the advent of the Reebok Pump basketball shoe, two ’80s icons that have both figured prominently in recent episodes. This approach gives the show a slightly absurdist tone, but in a weird way, it helps to better capture the sense of the Awesome ’80 than a show with a more persnickety focus on detail might. We end up with something that feels true rather than strictly factual. Kind of like the jumbled, middle-aged, increasingly unreliable memories of the Gen-Xers who surely comprise the show’s target demographic.
(It also occurs to me that perhaps this “1980-something” trope says something about how we Xers recall our youth versus how the Baby Boomers who made The Wonder Years saw theirs. They were all about earnestness and bittersweet poignancy, whereas — if a sitcom can be said to be representative of a generation — we’re a lot more irreverent about our formative decade. That’s not to say The Goldbergs is never poignant — I frequently get a little something in my eye while watching — but it lacks the self-consciousness and self-importance of its predecessor. To follow this through to the grossest overgeneralization I’ll ever make based on a half-hour sitcom, the Boomers wanted to change the world; we Xers just wanted to have fun with it.)
The Goldbergs‘ theme song — if a composition only 30 seconds long can really be called a song — has a similar post-modern, mix-and-match origin. Performed by a band called I Fight Dragons, “Rewind” is a mixture of pop instruments and vocals with something called “chiptune,” electronic music and other sounds originally synthesized by vintage computers and video games. The result, like the show itself, is weirdly effective at evoking the feel of the ’80s without really being much like an actual TV theme from the era. I’ll warn you now before you click “Play”: it’s insanely catchy.
I love it.
I recently tweeted I Fight Dragons to ask if there’s a longer version of this, and they actually responded… it won’t be on their upcoming album, but they will “definitely be doing a full-length version soon.” Something to watch for…
