There’s a difference between TV shows that you admire (for the writing, the acting, the technical finesse, etc.) and TV shows that you can’t stop watching. The latter describes a specific mode of fandom, and that’s the relationship I have with That ’70s Show (1998-2006), starring Topher Grace, Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Laura Prepon, Wilmer Valderrama and others.
A teen sitcom focusing on the lives of a group of youngsters in Wisconsin, U.S., in the late 70s, That ’70s Show was one of the most popular TV comedies of its time. Last month, Netflix released a sequel called That ’90s Show, featuring a new group of teenagers (with familial links to the original characters) in 1995.
One of the big stylistic tics of That ’70s Show was ‘recreating’ iconic TV and film moments of the 70s. So we had Jackie (Kunis) and Hyde (Danny Masterson) recreating the ‘You’re The One That I Want’ song from Grease, originally performed by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. The show also recreated iconic skits from ‘vintage’ sitcoms like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched, among others. That ’90s Show continues this tradition, recreating scenes from Beverly Hills 90210, with Beverly Hills alum Bryan Austin Green playing a caricature of himself.
Winning strategy for Hollywood
This tradition of ‘throwback TV’ has been a major force in Hollywood — exemplified, most recently, by the 2021 Marvel series WandaVision, where every episode is styled after a different sitcom. The show begins with the likes of Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show and moves forward in time, with Full House representing the 90s, Malcolm in the Middle representing the 2000s and Modern Family for the 2010s.
While this feels like a winning strategy, commercially speaking, there is a flip side to this approach as well. The late American writer David Foster Wallace, in his 1993 essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’, spoke about how the overuse of irony and allusion in American TV has influenced American writing (in a really bad way).
Wallace warns readers and writers against the templatised usage of ironic self-reference, using Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises as an example. In a 1988 episode of St. Elsewhere, an MTM medical drama, a deluded patient (played by an actor from The Bob Newhart Show, another MTM production) believes he is Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Endless nudge-winks follow, the coup de grace being Betty White playing a surgeon — the patient promptly calls her “Sue” after Sue Ann Nivens, the character White played on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. With “tragic inevitability (…) and a too-straight face”, White says he must have confused her for someone else. “There is nothing but television on this episode,” Wallace writes. “Every joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, meta-television. It is in-joke within in-joke.”
Overlapping story arcs
A promotional still from ‘That ’70s Show’, starring Topher Grace, Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Laura Prepon, Wilmer Valderrama and others.
The involution/ meta-television effect compounds over time in American television; Happy Days was a 70s production that poked gentle fun at the 50s, That ’70s Show was a 90s production parodying the 70s (including, and especially, Happy Days), That ’90s Show is a 2020s production parodying the 90s, and so on.
Disney and Marvel, with their rhizomatic sprawl of interconnected intellectual properties, are at a high risk of spiralling into the kind of ‘irony loop’ Wallace was warning us against. Out of the 20-plus feature films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe till date, only outliers like Thor: Ragnarok or Black Panther can truly be enjoyed in a standalone capacity; the rest are often too dependent upon callbacks, upon the often-tedious untangling of unresolved story arcs from other films. And while WandaVision and That ’90s Show are a great deal better (and can be understood on their own terms), Wallace’s overarching point is still valid.
Throwback TV can be cute and fun and probably helps streaming executives sleep better at night, safe in the knowledge that well-known intellectual property generally guarantees a certain minimum level of public interest. However, it cannot and should not be a substitute for good old fashioned ‘storytelling from scratch’.
It’s good to rope in new fans for old stuff. But it’s even better to earn those fans through something that’s 100% independent, something that does not depend upon hours and hours of pre-viewed footage — wouldn’t you agree?
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
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