Happy Days may not have been the first TV experiment in nostalgia. But co-creators Michael Eisner and Tom Miller definitely knew they were taking a risk when they pitched the show to Paramount. Not surprisingly, the concept didn’t fare well with execs, and the studio passed.
The market research department said a coming-of-age sitcom about the idealism and innocence of 1950s youth would never work in the trippy 1970s. But over time, with a little push from George Lucas, Happy Days made history as one of the most significant nostalgia-based shows of all time. And ever since Fonz and Richie Cunningham showed us how to laugh at our childhood, TV audiences have had a love affair with nostalgic TV shows.
Many new TV shows also followed the Happy Days formula, whether it was The Wonder Years, set in the late 1960s while airing in the late 1980s, or That 70s Show, which showed us the glee of the 1970s while airing in the 1990s. Even in the 2020s, we’ve never really stopped loving nostalgia and using “period pieces” as a storytelling technique. Today, with Gen X and Millennials at the wheel of modern culture, we’re tapping back into the 1980s and 1990s and remembering how boomers and slackers saw the world.
We were disconnected and barely scratching the surface of modern technology. But the memories were powerful enough to stick with us and symbolize the lives of whole generations. Here are eight TV shows that recreate or recapture yesterday’s nostalgia without being too c.
