The Top-20 Episodes of "The Wonder Years"

Back in the mid-1980s, the best way to ensure a successful launch for a new series was to air its pilot episode following the Super Bowl.  The first two series to do this were action series' "The A-Team" and "Airwolf" in 1983 and 1984, respectively, and both went on to be big hits.  Not every post-Super Bowl premiere would go on to be so huge but on January 31, 1988, ABC took a gamble on a comedy-drama period piece set in the late 1960s called "The Wonder Years", featuring 12-year-old Kevin Arnold coming of age and narrated by the adult version of Kevin.  The series launched with an outstanding pilot episode and would go on to run for six seasons on ABC.

"The Wonder Years" was stylistically different from anything else on television at the time and the showrunners were savvy about centering the series around the simple and often lighthearted affairs of an adolescent boy while also keeping the backdrop of Vietnam-era cultural turbulence always lurking inescapably in the shadows.  The series was especially adept at bouncing back and forth between the innocence of youth and the routine loss of that innocence on an episode by episode basis, and in some cases within the episodes themselves.  This template provided a broad range for the storytelling and tremendous capacity for character growth as the series progressed.

That character growth helped the show age well, both over the course of its six-season run on ABC and in regards to viewing the series again decades later as I recently did when I purchased the whole series on DVD.  Consuming the series by watching it on a nightly basis on DVD is a different experience than it was watching the episodes one week at a time when it originally aired from 1988 to 1993, as it was easier to identify the transitory phases of some of the series' main characters occurring on a more accelerated timeline.

The primary takeaway is that the Kevin Arnold character is kind of a dick....in fact more than kind of a dick!  Throughout the run of the series, he was something a user.  He used his parents, he used his friends, and he used his teachers.  He didn't appreciate his family, friends, or girlfriend when they had his best interests at heart and he had a hot temper that reared itself in unpleasant ways.  He was also smug and condescending when he either excelled at something or imagined that he excelled at something. In other words, he was a teenage boy.  And the character's annoying qualities were softened by the fact that the adult narrator fully realized what a dick he was when he was a teenager, with an appropriate level of regret for his youthful insufferability.

As for Kevin's parents, they were both fantastic, but in the case of his father, that wasn't always the case.  Early in the series' run, the Jack Arnold character was cold, distant, quick to boiling rage, and indifferent towards his kids' welfare, but the showrunners appropriately softened his edges in the coming seasons and made him a great father figure...still hard-nosed and intimidating, but with obvious love and sacrifice in his heart for his family.  His mother Norma was always a saint though, a 60s-era housewife who dependably held the line in a home full of egos and tempers, but found her calling later in the series when she went to school and got a career of her own.

Kevin's siblings were often harder to like to put it mildly.  His older sister Karen was a rebellious hippie who clashed regularly with her father.  While there were some epic father-daughter moments during the course of the series, the Karen character never grew on me as she always seemed aloof, unappreciative, and disrespectful.  Older brother Wayne required a much more complicated take, portrayed as an irredeemable sleaze early in the series' run who behaved like a nasty bully to hide his own tremendous insecurities.  While Wayne never became fully likeable, there was a rising tide of remarkable moments with the character as the series proceeded that humanized him greatly and suggested he would go on to be a pretty solid guy when he finally fully matured.

Kevin's two primary "friends" during the series also had mixed, but mostly positive, legacies.  Long-time girl-next-door sweetheart Winnie Cooper was mostly a positive influence and a likeable character full of heart and empathy, but was prone to prima donna moments and serious lapses in judgment that made it easy to understand why Kevin spent as much time broken up with her as together.  And best friend Paul Pfeiffer was a solid guy all around who was usually easy to cheer for, but was able to get under Kevin's skin in a way that was very tangible to the audience, particularly as the series proceeded and Paul more frequently got on a moral high horse.

As for the series' overall progression, there were moments of greatness throughout its run.  The first season was only six episodes, and the writers' strike of the summer of 1988 combined with the series' production challenges made episode output slow and behind schedule for its first two seasons.  Both seasons featured Kevin in the 7th grade and while there were epic moments and iconic episodes all around, there was also an outsized number of episodes devoted to the puerile pratfalls of adolescent relationships.  While these episodes were charming, humorous, and well-done, they didn't usually ascend to what I considered the best storytelling this series was capable of.

For my money, season 3 was the series' strongest.  The character was in 8th grade now and while there was still plenty of adolescent relationship drama, the character was maturing and had a deeper grasp on a variety of matters that made the life lessons imparted in the stories more impactful.  The series' also scored its highest ratings in season 3, a mainstay in the Nielsen top-10 for the 1989-90 season, although it got quite an assist from its cushy timeslot Tuesday nights between "Who's the Boss?" and "Roseanne".

The series was promoted by ABC in season 4 to lead its Wednesday night lineup, and while the outcome wasn't a disaster, the series lost a pretty fair share of its audience.  And the stories, while still very good more often than not, became a little less consistently great this year.  The slide continued in season 5, and the ratings had become middling by season's end, barely on the edge of satisfactory when it came to leading a weeknight schedule.  The content was more inconsistent even than season 4, with forgettable and lackluster outings not necessarily a regular feature but happening with more regularity than viewers had seen in the previous seasons.  The series had lost a lot of steam in just two years and found itself on the bubble for a season 6 renewal.

Thankfully, the sixth season happened.  There were some undeniable howlers in the bunch, with the series occasionally dipping to standard sitcom plot contrivances and stretching the audience's ability to accept Kevin's expansion pack resume, but there were also more excellent episodes in the season than the previous two, and a helpful transitory phase for the main characters with Jack starting his own furniture business and Norma finishing school and starting her career at the dawn of the women's liberation movement of the early 70s.  The ratings didn't substantially dip over the course of season 6, but they were mediocre enough the previous year that ABC was no longer satisfied.  "The Wonder Years" was on the bubble again, with producers hoping for a seventh season to follow Kevin to his high school graduation, and they ended the season with an episode that could function as either a season finale or series finale.

Unfortunately, ABC swung the ax and ended the series.  With as strongly as it finished, it's a shame ABC couldn't have let it go one more year, even if the final season was an abbreviated one.  Particularly when considering the clunker sitcoms that replaced it on Wednesday night in the fall of 1993, none of which lasted a full season, the premature death sentence for "The Wonder Years" seemed all the more indefensible.

I had originally planned to do a top-10 episode list but when I stopped to look back at how many exceptional moments the series put forward in its six seasons, I just had to expand my list to a top-20.  Honestly, it was hard not to expand it to a top-25.  When considering that they only made 114 episodes, that's a pretty high batting average for excellence.  Anyway, here's my top-20....

#20.  "Angel" (Season 1, Episode 4...originally aired April 5, 1988)......Kevin was never particularly close to older sister Karen (she was so distant, how could he be?) but he found himself extremely territorial when she got a serious boyfriend plucked from the hippie culture.  More profound, however, was the tense and thoughtful Vietnam War debate that "Louis" and Jack Arnold got into at the dinner table.  The conversation worked to enlighten Jack, awaken Kevin to the scary and consequential times they lived in, and foreshadowed the moment a few seasons ahead when Jack would have to face "sending his sons off to war" personally.

#19. "Poker" (Season 6, Episode 18....originally aired March 24, 1993).....For most of "The Wonder Years" final season, Kevin was in deep with a new set of friends, and we had been seeing less and less of long-time best friend Paul Pfeiffer.  The friends' group's semiregular poker game brought that dynamic to a head as the friends wanted Kevin to ditch Paul who they didn't connect with, and while Kevin casually defended him, he found himself increasingly agitated by Paul's idiosyncrasies and it was increasingly clear the two were drifting apart.  Most people can connect with that long-time best friend from school who they drifted away from over time, making this a fairly sad episode given how strong of a connection Paul and Kevin had as boys.  The closing scene helped to at least convince the audience that even though Paul and Kevin's friendship heyday was likely in the past, they would probably not drift apart entirely.

#18. "Carnal Knowledge" (Season 5, Episode 19....originally aired March 25, 1992)....If ever there was a tipping point where the aforementioned drifting between Kevin and Paul really escalated, it was this late season 5 episode where Kevin and his friends schemed to sneak into an adult movie.  Paul wouldn't go with the rest of the friends because he had some family friends over, including a college-age girl who he connected with.  The final moments of the episode were shocking when Paul came over to reveal to Kevin that he lost his virginity to the college-age girl who visited him.  Kevin, who always saw himself as better than Paul, had no idea how to respond to the shifted dynamic where he and his friends were proud of themselves for going to see a movie about sex while Paul was actually having it.

#17. "Hiroshima, Mon Frere" (Season 2, Episode 8....originally aired February 15, 1989)....The audience had gotten a taste at what an insufferable bully Kevin's older brother Wayne was already, but when Jack and Norma left Kevin and Wayne home alone one evening, it all came to a head.  Wayne's persistent rejections from the girls he was asking out made him particularly insecure and eager to lash out on his younger brother, but when Wayne accidentally took it too far, Kevin found the verbal tool box he needed to inflict some real emotional backlash on him.  The episode was uncomfortable at times, but the story cleverly drawn out with the brothers patching things up as much as they were capable of in the closing scene.

#16. "Private Butthead" (Season 5, Episode 14....originally aired February 5, 1992)....Wayne's long-standing insecurities were rearing themselves in life-changing ways as high school graduation approached and he and his goofy best friend "Wart" were committed in enlisting to fight for their country in Vietnam.  Jack, a one-time Vietnam War supporter, was now trying everything to talk Wayne out of enlisting, but a medical condition was the only thing that ultimately kept Wayne state-side, leading to one of Wayne's most vulnerable moments in the series and a highly emotional closing scene with his father.

#15. "New Year's" (Season 6, Episode 11....originally aired January 6, 1993).....Another fantastic Wayne episode, with Wayne out of high school, working with his father, and in a serious relationship with a 23-year-old woman with a young child.  Wayne was deeply in love and maturing quickly in a way that Kevin had a hard time coming to terms with.  Wayne made plans with the family for New Year's and Kevin was being a dick about it since he couldn't hang out with his friends as planned, but Kevin ended up being the first to learn that Wayne's girlfriend was dumping him after reconnecting with the baby daddy.  To his credit, Kevin was committed to finding his no-show brother, recognizing that his world was caving in on him.  When Kevin found a drunken Wayne at a laundromat, Wayne was taking it hard yet was surprisingly mature in his perspective, assuring viewers that Wayne was not likely to backslide into previous levels of immaturity and self-defeating backlash.

#14. "Don't You Know Anything About Women?" (Season 3, Episode 11....originally aired January 16, 1990).....For every guy who looks back to the female "friend" from school and recognizes in retrospect that they would have been a perfect couple, this episode hit especially hard.  Kevin had perfect chemistry with his 8th grade lab partner "Linda", a sassy, funny, and sorta-pretty-but-not-gorgeous girl who was drama-free and had a huge crush on Kevin.  But Kevin was pursuing the "hot girl" and using Linda to get closer to her, ultimately culminating in a request to go to "the dance".  Linda was quietly devastated when she put two and two together, and we never saw her again while Kevin was stuck with the hot blond who he ultimately didn't connect with.  We never saw Linda again and the adult narrator was now fully aware he blew it massively.

#13. "The Little Women" (Season 6, Episode 19.....originally aired March 31, 1993).....Some of the funnier episodes of "The Wonder Years" were the ones where the narrator's behavior was the most inappropriate.  In this episode, some evolving storylines came to a head when Norma was finished with school and got her first job at an impressively large salary.  Meanwhile, Kevin was thrilled when his SAT scores came in and were impressive, but far below the score of girlfriend Winnie Cooper, who was now looking at brochures for Ivy League colleges.  Naturally, father and son Jack and Kevin were feeling incredibly insecure about their manhood, particularly with the onset of the women's lib movement as a backdrop.  Their solution....invite the women for a macho game of bowling where they could crush them with their physical prowess and reassert their male dominance.  The entire episode was a scream from beginning to end, primarily because the adult narrator realizes so fully in retrospect what sexist pigs he and his father were being.

#12. "The Accident" (Season 4, Episode 20....originally aired April 24, 1991).....Kevin and Winnie had just broken up again a few episodes earlier, one of several times throughout the series but this was the time that hit Kevin the hardest.  But in the weeks after the break-up, they started to renew their friendship, and Winnie was suddenly coming over to hang out but acting very strangely and sending confusing mixed signals to Kevin.  It was clear this was all leading up to something, but the viewer didn't know exactly what, but ultimately when Winnie was injured in a minor car accident, it led to a wildly dramatic closing scene in the window of her home.  Not a dry eye was to be found among the millions watching.

#11.  "The Hardware Store" (Season 5, Episode 3.....originally aired October 16, 1991).....Kevin had his first job working for a surly but wise old man at a small hardware store.  He was incredibly unhappy and especially so when he saw some of his friends were working at the mall and had girls hanging all over them...and so began Kevin's quest to ditch the old man and get a job at the mall wearing a paper hat.  There were two undercurrents of sadness in the story.  First, Kevin had to break the old man's heart and quit the job to get a crummy job at the mall that the adult narrator realizes in retrospect was a huge mistake. But even sadder was the foreshadowing of the business' decline since Jack, who knew the old guy and was his biggest champion in terms of Kevin's employment at the hardware store, ultimately betrayed the old guy just as Kevin did, making up excuses to go to the mall to pick up the plumbing parts he needed rather than patronize the old guy's hardware store.

#10. "Math Class Squared" (Season 3, Episode 9....originally aired December 12, 1989).....Kevin introduced us to a lot of memorable former teachers over the course of the series' six seasons, but most impactful was the arc involving awkward, tough-as-nails 8th grade algebra teacher Mr. Collins that played out over the course of season 3.  Kevin respected the man despite how challenging his class was, and he sensed Collins respected him too.  When Kevin thought he'd get in on a cheating scheme put together by some classmates who were now outperforming him, and hope he'd pull it off without the crafty Collins figuring it out, Collins managed to show Kevin how much respect he had for him while simultaneously leveling a very clever life lesson in how he handled the cheating.

#9. "The Journey" (Season 4, Episode 3....originally aired October 3, 1990).....In a fun send-up to "Stand by Me", Kevin and some 9th grade friends were committed to scoring some beer and crashing a house party where some 10th and 11th grade girls were supposed to be.  They ran into an endless litany of hilarious obstacles on their way across town to this party, but the best punchline of the episode was the reception they met when they finally got to this house party and the hard-fought "journey" was complete.

#8. "The Family Car" (Season 3, Episode 7....originally aired November 21, 1989).... By this point in the series, hard-nosed Jack Arnold's edges had already been softened a fair amount and he had become a character impossible to not like.  We really learned what made him tick in this episode as he had to be drug kicking and screaming to replace the clunky old family car that he had invested so much time and energy into.  The rest of the family just wanted to be rid of the thing and onto a vehicle upgrade like all of their neighbors were getting, but by the time the wrecker came to tow away the old car at the end, Jack seemed to finally be at peace while the rest of the family finally understood how much it meant to him and all of them.

#7.  "Nemesis" (Season 2, Episode 11...originally aired March 14, 1989).....The second season of the "Wonder Years" was heavy on middle-school relationship drama and was usually pretty funny to observe from an adult perspective.  But at the center of this drama was Becky Slater, the girl Kevin had strung along to piss off Winnie Cooper, who didn't take it well, to put it mildly, when he broke things off.  As Kevin began to recall some of the not-so-nice things he had said to Becky about others, he became uneasy that the vindictive Becky would share these things.  It turned out he had reason to be concerned and Becky's methodical revelations and the reactions of Kevin and all the people he bad-mouthed made for one of the series' most hilarious episodes.

#6.  "The Lake" (Season 5, Episode 1....originally aired September 18, 1991).....Summer romance had been a successfully realized theme on "The Wonder Years" third season premiere as well, but Kevin connected much more deeply with summer romance "Cara" in the opening episode of season 5.  It was the kind of episode that hit way too close to home for anybody who had a summer fling in their formative years.  The episode was deserving of a follow-up act and got one at the end of season 5, another all-too-familiar situation where attempting to recreate the magic of the summer fling doesn't work out the second time around.

#5. "Summer/Independence Day" (Season 6, Episodes 21 and 22....originally aired May 12, 1993).....As I said in the introduction, the "Wonder Years" was on the bubble at the end of season 6 and the writers put together an episode that could function as a season finale OR a series finale, with a closing scene that could be altered if necessary in post-production if the series ended up getting canceled.  And it did get canceled.  The episode was a fine hour either way, with Kevin getting into a huge fight with his dad and opting to leave home in pursuit of girlfriend Winnie Cooper at her summer resort job, but when he got there he discovered that Winnie was looking to "find herself" in a different way.  Their intense fight didn't make each other look particularly good, and by episode's end they both acknowledged they probably weren't gonna end up together as they had long expected.  In one respect, it felt like there was another season's worth of storytelling ahead that could have given the series more appropriate closure, but the closing narration put together on the fly after it was revealed the series was canceled was a gut punch in several directions, masterfully written in how simultaneously heartbreaking and satisfying it was.

#4. "Pilot" (Season 1, Episode 1....originally aired January 31, 1988).....Moving from a fantastic final episode to a fantastic opening episode, "The Wonder Years" knew exactly what it was and exactly what it was gonna be in its brilliant premiere, providing a template for a long run with the series' emotional highs and lows on multiple fronts, establishing the well-drawn primary characters with splashes of humor, romance, and heartbreaking sorrow that reflected the loss of innocence of the culturally turbulent times that were America's reality in 1968.  It would have been hard for them to do any better with their opening pitch.

#3. "Goodbye" (Season 3, Episode 20....originally aired April 24, 1990).....Aforementioned algebra teacher Mr. Collins agreed to tutor Kevin to help him "get that A that he knows that he wants" in the third and best episode of the three-episode Mr. Collins arc that began early in season 3.  But when Collins started to cancel some tutoring sessions, Kevin took it personally and purposely blew the test.  When Kevin handed the test to Mr. Collins full of bullshit answers, the viewer could see the heartbreak on the normally stoic Mr. Collins' face, and as Kevin smugly walked out of the room, the audience knew what Kevin didn't...that that would be the last time we'd see Collins.  The emotionally charged closing with Collins' final posthumous gesture of respect towards Kevin was easily one of the series' narrative high points.

#2. "The Tree House" (Season 3, Episode 15....originally aired February 20, 1990)....Usually the more emotionally charged "Wonder Years" episodes were the most impactful, but the episodes that were just straight-up hilarious shouldn't be discounted either....and no episode was funnier than the episode where Kevin was petrified that his own father was about to give him the same awkward "talk" about the birds and bees that his friends were getting.  Sensing that father and son were avoiding each other, Norma requested some bonding over the construction of a treehouse, but that seemingly benign project ramped up the awkwardness when the shapely and scantily-clad female neighbor next door was loudly whistling while tending to her garden, making it impossible for father and son to avoid the elephant in the room.  Rarely has a series known its characters well enough to pull an episode like this off and rarely has a series so eloquently captured the awkwardness of the bonding experience between a blue-collar father and an adolescent boy.

#1. "Homecoming" (Season 6, Episode 1...originally aired September 23, 1992).....Thank goodness "The Wonder Years" was brought back for a sixth season as there were quite a few outstanding episodes that year, but none were more outstanding than the masterfully crafted season opener which articulated the series' fundamental conflict between innocence and innocence lost better than any other episode.  The audience is led to believe the episode will primarily be about Kevin and his friends pulling a prank against the rival team's mascot at the homecoming game, but the curve ball subplot that emerges and overwhelms that original story involves the return of Wayne's best friend Wart from Vietnam. Wart is clearly a changed man neck-deep in PTSD, and when Wayne stumbles upon him in the final throes of a breakdown, the audience experiences the shining moment of Wayne (and indeed any character during the tenure of the series) in his gesture.  The way the two storylines converge in the climax makes this episode a narrative perfect game above and beyond anything else the audience was treated to.

I knew going into my recent revisit of "The Wonder Years" that it would be fun and enriching, but it was even better than I expected.  I'd love to hear from producers what kind of story ideas they were spitballing for the would-be season 7.  Most shows in their final seasons are weary and long overdue to be put down, but that was not true of "The Wonder Years" and I have a feeling that more unforgettable moments of television were sacrificed in 1993 when ABC turned the lights off on "The Wonder Years" to replace it with....."Thea".  Still, the series got 114 episodes, most of which offered at least something admirable, bringing either a smile to your face or a tear to your eye.  The writing was sparkling and the cast had consistent chemistry and charisma.  Hard to ask for much more.