‘The Wonder Years’ Reboot Coming to ABC

The Wonder Years is officially coming back to your TV screens. Although, as Variety reported, there are some exciting changes on the way for the reboot, which landed a pilot production commitment at ABC. The new series will focus on the Black middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1960s, meaning that it will take place in the same period as the original series.

Saladin K. Patterson, who previously worked on The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and Frasier, will write and executive produce the reboot. Lee Daniels and Marc Velez will also be executive producing the series, doing so via Lee Daniels Entertainment. In a fun tie back to the original series, Fred Savage, who starred on the original Wonder Years, will direct the pilot and will also executive produce the show. There have been no details released yet regarding the cast or when the pilot will film.

The Wonder Years initially aired on ABC for six seasons and over 100 episodes from 1988 to 1993. It starred Savage as Kevin Arnold, the youngest child in the Arnold family on which the series centered. Interestingly enough, in July of 2019, Savage addressed the possibility of making a Wonder Years reboot and said that it likely wouldn’t happen. “People ask me [about a reunion] all the time, and I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation that people, all these years later, are not only talking about the show — that it not only still means something to people and they’re sharing it with the next generation — but that they still want to see more and new stuff,” Savage said, per the New York Post.

As he went on to share, he believed that revisiting the show would defeat its “purpose” in a way. “I would say that one of the things that makes ‘The Wonder Years’ special was that time in your life it refers to, which is something you really can’t go back to,” he continued. “You can’t revisit that. That’s what makes that time in your life so bittersweet and so special and why people look back on it with such joy and heartbreak and longing. With each passing year, that time of your life, those years in adolescence … another layer of patina is added to it — and I think to revisit it kind of defeats the purpose of the show.”