Kevin Arnold and the Meaning of Life

Contrary to popular belief, the dude in the glasses is NOT Marilyn Manson

By Josh Corman

Sometimes, God gives you a gift so unlooked for that you can hardly verbalize your thanks. That’s how I felt when I saw that Netflix had made The Wonder Years available in its entirety.

Sure, it doesn’t have Joe Cocker’s cover of “With a Little Help from my Friends” over the opening credits (soundtrack copyright complexities are the reason why the show still hasn’t seen a DVD release) and not a minute of it is in HD, but The Wonder Years was the first real television show I ever loved, and I’m thrilled to have it back.

For those unfamiliar, The Wonder Years follows a somehow world-weary eleven year-old named Kevin Arnold through his youth, starting in 1968. The show aims to be at once a nostalgic trip through the late sixties’ cultural upheavals and a sort of suburban bildungsroman. Our hero Kevin narrates the entire series from the distant future, offering the audience wry insight into his own awkward pubescent development and waxing philosophical about the nature of love, family, youth, loss, change, and fear. Every episode, at one point or another, veers frighteningly close to irredeemable cheesiness. Somehow, though, it always seems to pull it together just when it matters most, because, at the end of the day, The Wonder Years’ sincerity made up for its flaws (this sentence is exactly the sort of feel-good platitude Kevin’s adult narrator persona loved to close episodes with).

Yes, The Wonder Years taught me a lot. I learned about the Vietnam War and Buffalo Springfield in the same episode. I learned about RFK, Gloria Steinem, The Byrds, and Woodstock. But, even more remarkably, I learned that things don’t always work out the way you want them to, even on a sitcom. The series ends after Kevin’s first and truest love, Winnie Cooper, rejects him. He then loses all his money and his car in a poker game and, dejected and defeated, returns to his parents’ home. I saw this last episode when the show was in syndication, and I remember my outrage. Kevin and Winnie are meant to be together. How could this happen?

Now, of course, I get it. Not getting the girl, suffering the misery so that the good times mean so much more, blah, blah, blah. It was this sort of battered wisdom I looked forward to when I sat down the other day and knocked out a few episodes. The first two were just as I remembered: funny, a little hokey, in love with its setting. Then, I watched episode three, in which Kevin goes to work with his dad, Jack.

Basically, Kevin watches Jack come home from work, exhausted, day after day. And day after day, Jack brushes past his family, sits in the dark of the living room and watches television, where he demands peace and quiet. Wondering what makes his dad so angry every day, Kevin asks Jack about his work until Jack invites Kevin for a day at the office. Kevin watches his dad, amazed at the prowess with which he manages his employees at a manufacturing and distribution office.

Over coffee, eleven year-old Kevin asks his father when he knew he wanted to be a manager overseeing distribution at Norcom. Jack laughs and tells his son that he got an internship at Norcom one summer during college, and that he’s worked there ever since. One thing led to another and all that. Jack explains that what he really wanted to do was captain a ship. Freighter, ocean liner, tanker, it didn’t matter to him. Jack tells his son about the romance of being alone under the stars, using the sky to guide your way home and how the sea has fascinated him since childhood.

Soon after their conversation, Jack’s boss dresses him down in front of Kevin and the rest of the office, and Jack’s daily frustrations are suddenly much easier for Kevin to understand.

My dad frequently came home frustrated and distant, too. He wasn’t often in town, but when he was, he rarely wanted to rise from his recliner to play HORSE or throw around a baseball. Mostly, he wanted to be left alone after a day’s worth of annoyances and petty problems and fatigue.

I never asked my father when he decided he wanted to manage clean-up crews for his father’s environmental services company. I bet he would have answered much like Jack. One thing led to another. Like Kevin, I watched my father’s seemingly inscrutable behavior and wondered why he wasn’t a better dad. Unlike Kevin, I never understood how much of himself my father had given up by working where he did. Kevin realizes the element of greatness in his father that I never saw in mine. It’s an ugly sort of heroism, grinding away, day after day, so that your children can have different opportunities than you had, opportunities like, say, writing memoirs and contributing to websites and theology books.

The third episode ends with Kevin and Jack in the back yard, looking through a telescope at the stars. Jack points out a few constellations to his son, and Kevin peers into the telescope with a renewed appreciation for who his father is.

Kevin doesn’t verbalize what the audience must be thinking by the end of the episode, that we all wish Jack had shown the courage to shun the security of his job with Norcom and captained that ship after all. But that’s really beside the point. We’ve all made choices we can’t un-make, and we’ve all had to consider the sometimes odious consequences of those choices. In those moments, the only way to stay sane is to understand that what could’ve been is no longer in play, and our focus has to be on making sure that our next choice is a good one. In Jack Arnold’s case, the regrets are real, but they’re outweighed (at least for the audience), by the willingness he’s shown to endure what must often feel like a miserable life for the sake of his family. Whatever his flaws, he’s doing something few people have the constitution to do.

The Wonder Years wore its heart on its sleeve, but cheesy or not, there isn’t a whole lot about that show that rings false, and at the end of the day... ahh, just do yourself a favor and go watch a few episodes.