When I saw that Netflix was rebooting That 70’s Show franchise as That '90s Show, I was excited! The aesthetic of That '70s Show but with the backdrop of my childhood!
But then I realized something. Did I just get old?
It feels strange living through the transfer of power of one generation's interpretation of the “past” for another’s. The 70’s were a grimy time, toxic drug culture leading to crises of the 80’s and 90’s. Yet, that is not how the show depicts itself in this this time. We get a small town, with a small-town vibe. No sense of a greater scale of conflict, just some small-town kids going through their own universal problems. Of love, friendship, following their hearts, and getting into trouble. I get that it was a comedy, but comedy doesn’t mean avoiding the uncomfortable.
Watching That '90s Show you would also have no idea. We had AIDs, Rodney King, Bill Clinton, and Grunge. The underlying cultural angst. Yet, here we are with just another group of small-town kids wrestling with their own set of universal problems. This time around though, they cleaned up some things, clearing the previous homophobia, uncertain xenophobia, to the themes being more explicit, and less other. The foreign kid is no longer foreign in the white gentrified sense of That 70’s Show. Where the joke was partly “where is he from,” but actually foreign in designation and look. Like hey there are other countries, and nationalities.
What I find interesting about the show is that both incarnations of the show feel like the reflection of the times. Not just in content, but in what we are willing to accept and how.
The cast of That '70s Show turned out to be a bit sus in character and behaviors toward women on and off set. This escalated to the point of becoming a legal matter for one of the actors.
You can see this subtle but flagrant objectification of women in That '70s Show. They were always important only insofar as their relationship to the men. That '90s Show seeks to rectify this and almost switches the mold entirely by putting the women front and center. While the men are not as objectified in a pointless way, and have some of their own autonomy, they certainly do not carry the show.
This time around the show sheds the “is he or is he not gay?” as a punch line and getting rid of the latent homophobia in That '70s Show. They also shed the ambiguous foreigner. This seems like a reflection of our times not just in the acceptance of a gay character, but who they chose the foreigner to be. Another reflection of our times; openness to the other with a hint of xenophobia.
It also makes this discrepancy between the shows more obvious and more noticeable. To the level of what was the point of That '70s Show? Other than to be nostalgic porn of a 70’s era that never really existed in reality? This reality only existing in the minds of the kids whose parents lived through this time. Restructuring the story line through pictures, advertisements, and movies. Sheek like the glossy photos of the pimps, and playboy bunnies. If you were really paying attention, you would wonder why the #metoo movement didn’t happen sooner, and how it was inevitable with technology.
Remember the irony here; That '70s Show was made in the 90’s. This was also a grimy time layered like coke lines on a table, each decade leading us darker and darker down a more absurd hole.
We too had our messiahs die young. In the 90’s, our drug addicted burnouts. An angst that can only come from the boredom of industrialization. But you wouldn’t know from That '90s Show. Here is where we get meta. Consider That '90s Show is being made at a time when democracy is at stake, #metoo, whose roots can arguably be found in the 90’s, has exposed a darkness we had hoped was only in the movies.
There were capital riots, COVID-19, a complete break from the “social contract.” Inflation, war, and a continual environmental crises. Issues that were plaguing each decade. Until they came home to roost in the 21st century. In this time, we have a new interpretation of the 90’s. A more innocent time, a time filled with less uncertainty.
This is where we begin to build the chain of generations. Each generation was fraught with war, with xenophobia, sexism, assault culture, towards the lesser then, under the thumb of patriarchy. Each culture has wrestled with the impending question that arises with the advancement of civilization: Are we all destined to self-destruct, inadvertently paving the way to global destruction with good intentions?
But here is where we have to substitute reality for entertainment, and eventually it becomes our history. Reliving the interpretations of the past through our own lens. Filling in the gaps with our own experience.
Do I recommend That '90s Show? I don’t know. Did it begin an existential crisis? One that made me think about how we fabricate our reality, and poses the question, could nostalgia ever be accurate? Yes absolutely. Is it at the heart just a fun show? Yes, but that doesn’t mean fun doesn’t have a price.
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