nostalgia

ABC Is Rebooting The Wonder Years With a Little Help From Lee Daniels

Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images for TIME

What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on a beloved series by dooming it to a music-licensing quagmire? Wonder no more, because ABC announced that it is producing a pilot for a reimagining of the 1980s-’90s series The Wonder Years, executive-produced by director Lee Daniels. The half-hour comedy pilot will center on “a Black, middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama, in the turbulent late 1960s, the same era as the original series,” and how the family “made sure it was The Wonder Years for them, too.” The Last O.G. executive producer Saladin Patterson is writing the pilot script, and ABC will assemble a “mini writer’s room triggered upon pilot script approval.” Fred SavageKevin Arnold from the original Wonder Yearsis attached to direct (they grow up so fast). A look at social changes during the era of the civil-rights movement, through the personal lens of a Black family, set in the town of Freedom Riders and Rosa Parks, is a very promising way to retool ABC’s nostalgia property. We hope the music budget is massive.

Wonder Years to Reboot With a Little Help From Lee Daniels