'That '90s Show' Season 1 Episode 1 Recap: 'That '90s Pilot'
That ’90s Pilot
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
That ’90s Pilot
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Photo: /Vulture; Photo: Patrick Wymore/NetflixK WYMORE/NETFLIX
Every show likes to think it’s the exception to any preconceived negativity about endless reboot culture. Yes, the creators may admit, remakes and reboots and long-gap sequels are often by turns shameless, dispiriting, or otherwise not quite right — especially when they’re competing with a hundred or two episodes that have looped for ages in syndication. But won’t ours be the one made with such TLC that even skeptics are won over?
At least That ’90s Show might actually include some TLC at some point — if Netflix ponies up for the music licensing. (The signs are there: It can afford Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop.”) Then again, it’s part of a pretty rockist franchise. That ’90s Show is the sequel series to That ’70s Show, a sitcom that does admittedly feel like a good candidate for a quarter-century-later revival. The original series began during the twilight of the sitcom gods, premiering a few months after Seinfeld left the air and limping along a couple of years past the end of Friends. Those two NBC powerhouses brought ’90s singleton-coms to their apex, and the multi-camera sitcom waned by comparison in their absence. The Office (which, it’s strange to consider, actually first aired while That ’70s Show was still a going concern) helped usher in a different style of TV comedy in the mid-2000s, while CBS kept it more traditional (and less critically acclaimed) with Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory.
With the memories of so many titans of the form still fresh — That ’70s Show was literally next to The Simpsons early in its run — the sitcom about a sextet of teenagers in 1970s Point Place, Wisconsin, was a throwback several times over. It was broad, rowdy, and yuppie-free, sure, but it felt akin to sitcoms like Happy Days — looking back on a generic version of the ’70s with the same nostalgia Happy Days bestowed on its 1950s setting. And it was a sitcom for young people. Of course, plenty of kids and teenagers watched The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends, but those shows presented zero teenage characters (Jimbo, Dolph, and Kearney may count depending on how old they’re actually supposed to be). That ’70s Show, meanwhile, had a bunch of cute, unknown stars-in-the-making to rile up an excitable studio audience with their smooching and double entendres. The show’s “youth culture MTV meets ABC” sensibility allowed That ’70s Show to exist largely out of time despite its title.
So it only makes sense for That ’90s Show to jump on the meta-nostalgia bandwagon 25 years later, attempting to recapture some element of the era that produced its predecessor. It’s 1995, and former teenage sweethearts Eric (Topher Grace) and Donna (Laura Prepon) are now married and living in Chicago with their teenage daughter, Leia (Callie Haverda). Star Wars fandom may not have been as visible in ’95 as it would be just a few years later, but it lives on in both Eric Forman’s kid and his syllabus. He’s an adjunct professor teaching a course on the religion of Star Wars, while Donna has made it as a published author. Eric’s parents, Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp) and Red (Kurtwood Smith), are still kicking around Point Place. Their homey kitchen and homier basement are intact, and though their familiarity has that sitcom-set sheen, they still look more lived-in than the sets of, say, Fuller House.
If that sounds like a lot of throat-clearing before we get to what actually happens on the first episode of That ’90s Show, well, that’s appropriate. The episode itself is about one-third genial introductions, one-third reintroductions to raucous studio-audience applause, and one-third hasty setup. Its single conflict arises and resolves so quickly that it might escape your attention entirely. Basically, during a Forman family visit to Point Place for Independence Day, Leia chafes at the daddy-daughter closeness Eric expects from his formerly little girl. During the trip, she meets Gwen (Ashley Aufderheide), a cool riot-grrrl type who lives in Donna’s old house next door, and Leia decides — in a flush of excitement that feels like half-friend-crush and half-crush-crush — that she wants to stick around for the whole summer. This means forsaking Eric’s plans for a bonding trip to Space Camp. It also means delighting Kitty — who pines for her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter between holiday visits and spends an inordinate amount of time at her mother’s grave. Red grumbles characteristically about inviting young people back into their basement.
That’s the nominal story of the episode. Really, “That ’90s Pilot” is about introducing new ’90s analogs to the original cast, which (apart from the invaluable Smith and Rupp) will not be sticking around full time. Leia, of course, takes after her dad, though her gawkiness is more nerdily sheltered and less snarky. Gwen follows in Donna’s “cool girl next door” footsteps, while the sardonic Ozzie (Reyn Doi) has an outsider status reminiscent of that of Fez (Wilmer Valderrama), not so much because he’s Asian American but because he’s gay — openly to his friends and more cautiously to less perceptive adults. Gwen’s brother, Nate (Maxwell Acee Donovan), has the genial-doofus vibes of Ashton Kutcher’s Kelso, and his girlfriend, Nikki (Sam Morelos), has self-confident vibes not dissimilar to Jackie’s (Mila Kunis). But perhaps in an understandable bid to further scrub any reference to Hyde (formerly played by Danny Masterson, whose second rape trial begins this spring after his first ended in a mistrial), the other dude in this group of six is also a Kelso — in a more literal sense: Jay (Mace Coronel) is the son of Kelso and Jackie.
In an episode that already has substantial screen time set aside for Kitty, Red, Eric, and Donna, six brand-new characters is a lot to balance, which may be why this 30-minute reunion-pilot feels both packed and a little insubstantial — to some degree coasting on the novelty of catching up with a bunch of sitcom characters whose timeline (three-and-a-half years stretched out over eight seasons) and future (the original series ends as soon as the 1980s arrive) remained comfortably nebulous. For example, we learn that Kelso and Jackie got married. Then divorced. Then married and divorced again. Real-life couple Kutcher and Kunis play their walk-on in the pilot as Kelso and Jackie on their way to their second remarriage. In a weird way, Hyde’s presumably permanent banishment only adds to the realism. Sure, some people marry their high-school sweethearts (Kutcher and Kunis basically did!), but there will be some friends who disappear from your life completely.
But That ’90s Show mostly wants to provide a comfort watch, extending a nostalgia chain that now reaches back over half a century: It throws back to the ’90s airings of a ’70s-set show that felt like a sorta-modern, sorta-not take on a ’70s-aired show about the ’50s. The downside to this mostly pleasurable decade-skipping dizziness is the open question of whether Leia and her friends can register as more than a blip on the timeline (like, say, That ’80s Show, the 2002 companion series that likely won’t be revived without Crackle making a desperate original-programming push). After all, That ’70s Show had a 25-episode first season. If That ’90s Show has a typical Netflix run, it’ll take four seasons to barely exceed that number. But let’s not worry too much about the future. Leia is in Point Place for a memorable summer (it’s a little surprising that no one makes a reference to that Saved By the Bell Malibu Sands season). And what’s more mid-to-late ’90s than unfounded ’70s nostalgia?
• A low-key meta touch happening behind the scenes: That ’90s Show is co-created by Bonnie and Terry Turner (the SNL writers who made That ’70s Show with Mark Brazill) with That ’70s Show producer Gregg Mettler and the Turners’ daughter Lindsey, who probably would have been somewhere around Leia’s age in 1995.
• Also around Leia’s age in 1995: Me, your humble recapper! This means I will be relentlessly policing this lighthearted and intentionally non-exacting chronicle of the 1990s for anachronisms! Actually, let’s start with some age issues. One of the pilot’s better jokes puts a number on Eric: “Eric’s having a hard time with Leia,” Donna says. “It’s a tough age … 38.” Eric being 38 years old in 1995 means he was born in 1957, which would make him 19 in 1976, when That ’70s Show begins. This fits pretty well with Leia’s age — she was born around 1980, which would have been when Eric and Donna were about 23. But That ’70s Show follows the characters for three years and change, and they’re somewhere around 20 at the end of the series, not the beginning. The number 38 is likely a compromise between the actual ages of Topher Grace and Laura Prepon (a still-youthful-looking 44 and 42, respectively) and the ages these characters should be based on that 1976 start (around 35). Or the writers are understandably less precious about this than I am. The point is that this might be less of an issue had That ’70s Show run for a nice, reasonable five seasons instead of getting the vintage Fox treatment, which back in the ’90s and 2000s dictated that promising new shows be canceled swiftly and mercilessly, while any hits run for as close to a decade as possible even if their cast members lost interest.
• ’90s-Reference Watch: As a self-deputized member of the anachronism police, I must commend this pilot for its two main musical reference points — “You Oughta Know,” by Alanis Morissette, and “Sad Tomorrow,” by the Muffs — for being perfectly appropriate to the summer of 1995.
• Director Gail Mancuso has been an astonishingly prolific and successful sitcom pro for more than 30 years, but some of the excess traffic direction in this episode gets the better of her. Some of the entrances, exits, and asides aren’t quite as physically snappy as the best of the original series or the similarly multi- and single-camera mixes like How I Met Your Mother. Sometimes, the episode seems to be sacrificing multi-cam wide shots for single-cam-style cutting.
• That said, one of the best moments comes from the revival of the circle-cam format that was the original series’ signature. Typically used to capture teenagers in conversation while high (a neat bit of symbolic joint-passing for a show that couldn’t actually depict joints being smoked), here it’s used to show Eric, Donna, Kitty, and Red playing cards around the kitchen table like total olds — the ubiquitous smoke cloud belonging to burnt popcorn instead of weed. “You’re upstairs people now,” Red says with relish.
