Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

By Isaac White.

While I love to watch movies and television, most of the time when I see a reboot, remake, or spinoff of a show or movie I love from the past, I cringe. Mostly because we’ve seen many, many terrible remakes and reboots of classic tv and cinema. This week I’m reviewing That 90’s Show and… this show falls into the category of…Why?

I was born in 1981, I’m now in my 40’s and my childhood took place in the 80’s and ’90s. Something I’ve noticed is that young people, such as my son and his friends, have an almost reverence for the 90s. Having spent a lot of my formative years during that decade I can understand why.

My generation is a sort of hybrid between old school and new. Much of the pop culture phenomena those in my generation experienced, are now being explored by our children’s generation and I hope if they watch this show, they don’t take it as a very strong representation of that decade.

That 90’s Show is a spinoff of a sitcom that I loved when it debuted in 1998 and continue to have great affection for to this day, That 70’s Show. The new iteration of this series is supposed to arouse deep feelings of nostalgia for those of us “from the 90s”, and to take advantage of the curiosity and appreciation the Gen Zer’s have for the 1990s.

What this show does is taint the legacy of a truly great sitcom that DID manage to bring people my age back to what many of us looked at as a fun decade, the 1970s. They also managed to make me watch this offering at 1.5 speed because I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could get through the drudgery and write about it. I would have watched it at double speed, but my eyes and ears aren’t as sharp as they were during the ’90s.

Trust me, I was looking forward to this show, had it set for a notification on Netflix, and I began watching it very close to when it was released on the service. It was not up to snuff for me right away so I left it there in the continue watching section of my profile thinking that if I give it a break and pick it up later with a fresh view, perhaps it would get better. It did not.

The premise for the show is that it picks up roughly 20 years after the original series ended. The original cast of young characters from That 70’s Show is now middle-aged with careers, marriages, divorces, and kids.

Eric and Donna, the main couple from the original show are married and have a daughter Leia, whom Eric named after a certain princess from a treasured sci-fi movie series that hit screens in the 70s. Eric and Donna along with their daughter, go to visit Point Place, Wisconsin for a visit with Red and Kitty, Eric’s parents.

While in Point Place, Leia meets some other teenagers from town and decides it would be fun to spend the summer with her grandparents and forge relationships with the other kids. Leia is not the most socially fluent person on the planet and urges her parents to let her stay so she can expand her circle of friendly relationships. While this doesn’t exactly mimic the original premise of the show, the way it’s presented doesn’t feel right.

Perhaps I had too high of expectations. As I mentioned earlier, I am very cognizant that reboots and remakes have a notoriously bad track record. Unrealistic expectations are something I considered, then promptly discarded.

Let’s take a look at the cast of kids who are now the focus of the Foreman’s basement adventures. For the most part, these characters seem very surface-level shallow. I know it’s a sitcom but in the original series there were some decent examinations of what it’s like to be a teenager and they were done in a good way. That 70’s Show went on for about 2 seasons too long but that’s another issue.

The teenagers in this show are not what I remember kids being like in the 90s. Sure there are some things that I watched and said, “oh yeah, I remember doing that”, but overall the vibe of the kids just missed the mark for me. These new kids just don’t seem to me like they gelled on screen.

I also had hoped above all that the now 40ish kids from the original would be a focal point of the show. They aren’t and that is a shame because when they are on screen it’s great, although fleeting. The only holdovers from the original series who are featured in the show are Red and Kitty.

That is really about the only thing I can praise for this show. Although others may disagree, I think that Kurtwood Smith (Red), and Debra Jo Rupp (Kitty) are superb in this reboot, just as they were in the progenitor of this unfortunate show.

Red is still as cranky and hilarious to me as he was in That 70’s Show. Kitty’s character seems to have been opened a little more than the original because we get to hear more from Kitty’s perspective on child rearing and what she thought of the kids who occupied her basement 20 years prior.

The only other thing that I liked about this show was that the cast was very diverse. There were people of color included in the teenage group of characters, and there is a young man who is gay and trying to figure out how to tell his parents. Those are points that I enjoyed but that’s about it.

This show would have been better served to include all of the original cast serving more time on screen because when they are there, THAT’S when the nostalgia bell dings. I found myself wishing and hoping that the old gang would be sitting around the circle in the basement with some sort of smoke in the air, talking about what it’s like to have kids who are in high school, complaining about work, and discussing what it’s like to be a grownup.

Had the creators of the original done that, I think they could have made the current group of teens more accurate as well. I’m surprised that the old gang from That 70’s Show didn’t weigh in on the tone and accuracy of this series. They were teenagers at the same time I was and I’m quite sure they could have helped steer this ship in a better direction.

In the end, I was very disappointed with this series. I think they did a major disservice to a show I adore and that they created. They didn’t connect with the people who watched that show when they were teenagers in the 90s. They also didn’t portray the 90s in a more interesting way to the young people who are going to watch this show and think that is the way things were in that decade. Overall very terrible and I hope they don’t make a second season of this show if it’s going to continue down this road in the same manner as the first.