Created by Bonnie Turner & Terry Turner & Lindsey Turner & Gregg Mettler
Starring Debra Jo Rupp, Kurtwood Smith, Callie Haverda, Ashley Aufderheide, Mace Coronel
Season 1 streaming now on Netflix

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

That 90s Show is a reboot/nostalgia-fest of a show, lovingly crafted in the shadow of its predecessor, That 70s Show, which itself was nostalgic for a specific time and place. Appropriately enough, That 90s Show has great affection for its own decade and references, from Riot grrrl posters to video stores stocked from floor to ceiling with tapes. It’s like Inception, but for nostalgia. It doesn’t get any more meta than that.

While That 70s Show had daydream sequences lampooning TV shows of its day, like Charlie’s Angels, That 90s Show has skits with our characters being on a very similarly plotted episode of 90210.

Nostalgia is all well and good, but it’s never enough to completely sustain anything. Nostalgia, like any other storytelling tool, can be powerful when wielded properly, or it can be a cynical cash grab if handled by the wrong people. Hell, even a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg has been on opposite ends of that spectrum, dreamily filming the emotional roller coaster of his childhood—or dreadfully rendering pop culture references in the misstep that was Ready Player One.

That 90s Show is set in 1995, two decades after the events of the original series That 70s Show. We are introduced to Eric and Donna’s child, Leia (obviously named after Princess Leia, Eric being the Star Wars nerd that he is, all grown up), visiting her grandparents over the summer—the same old house, the same old basement, in Point Place, Wisconsin.

Eric wants to take Leia to space camp, something he would have found endlessly fascinating when he was her age. But she’s not him. She wants to spend the rest of her summer there, getting to know her new best friend Gwen, who lives in the house Donna used to live in next door. She wants to have fun, for the first time in her life. She wants to be a teenager.

Along for the ride, we meet Nate, Gwen’s half-brother, and his girlfriend Nikki; Ozzie, their sarcastic friend; and, of course, a Kelso. Jay Kelso, the son of Jackie and Michael—who are back together, and we see for a quick, thirty-second cameo.

Over the course of this season, they get into trouble, fall in and out of… I hesitate to say “love”, perhaps “like” is more appropriate, drink beer, smoke pot, and generally just behave as teenagers did in the 70s, 90s, and even today.

So, does That 90s Show stand on its own?

Almost!

It’s real close. Red and Kitty are as funny and charming as ever. The cameos from the original cast are highlights—Fez in his few appearances is hysterically funny, like laugh out loud funny. Eric and Donna bring a certain charm in being the exhausted parents who now have to fear their child doing the exact thing that they did when they were younger. There’s a great gag in the first episode involving the camera panning around a smoke-filled room, only this time it’s not weed, it’s slightly burned popcorn as the grownups have a moment alone without the kids.

Hell, even Bob’s episode appearance is great. I’ve always loved Bob.

I mostly have positive things to say about the show. Some of the gags are very funny. The nostalgia for the era, and the original show, feel very genuine and none of it feels forced. I just think it’s very difficult to hit the right tone straight out of the gate, especially as a spin-off/sequel/follow-up set this many years later. I think it’s just going to take another season to get it right.

I think That 70s Show was pretty close to great from the beginning, but there was nothing for it to follow up to or compare itself to. It got to be itself, and I think that’s the missing ingredient from That 90s Show. TV is so different now. It used to be, you’d have 24 episodes in a first season to throw everything you had at the wall and see what sticks. These days, you get 10—if you’re lucky. It just leaves very little room for experimentation. A sitcom relies on its characters, and it takes a while to figure out exactly who they are. We need to spend whole episodes with them—some episodes are important to their growth; others are just inconsequential hangout sessions. I think That 90s Show would really benefit from that kind of structure and freedom.

It’s funny to watch a show like That 90s Show, which has a sort of fondness for the era of movies on tape, when that’s the era I used to watch That 70s Show in. Whenever I think of the great sitcoms of the decade, I rarely think of That 70s Show, which is an oversight on my part, because that show and I go way back. I remember talking with my friends about the first episode premiere at school the next day. And I remember missing one episode, only to have my buddy tell me, “Oh, well I taped it last night, I’ll let you borrow it,” something kids these days will never experience.

That 90s Show has the potential to grow into something very good. It has a lot going for it. It has a talented, young cast, it has some very funny moments, and it has a lot of help from seasoned veterans. I think it just needs to plow full steam ahead with whatever it wants to do, and now what’s expected of it, or to compare itself to the original. I think once it can do that, once it can leave the shadow of what came before, it can really do something special.