After 'The Wonder Years premiered after the Super Bowl in 1988 it was a certified hit. Unlike many classic sitcoms, The Wonder Years has maintained a positive reputation by today's standards. That's saying something since most of it was set in the late 1960s, a tumultuous time in the United States. In many respects, the show, which was created by Neal Marlens and Carol Black, is better than anything of its genre on TV today. A lot of that has to do with how the ABC show effortlessly blended authentic and moving moments with truly funny ones. It was also one of the first shows to use a narrator (Home Alone's Daniel Stern) to bookend each episode and provide story and emotional context. On top of this, it's also the show that helped star Fred Savage dominate the sitcom genre for a decade. Here's the truth about what actually inspired this beloved show...

A True Recognition Of The Past Created The Wonder Years

The growing pains of a suburban family's youngest kid, Kevin (Fred Savage) was the focus of the series. While the show set up many traditional coming-of-age tropes, such as the young love (Winnie Cooper, played by Danica McKellar), it didn't shy away from tragedy. Not only did characters not end up with their love interests but characters actually died. In truth, it was supposed to reflect some level of reality. These creative choices set it apart from the vast majority of sitcoms at the time which mostly focused on sweet moments where everything is wrapped up nicely at the end of each episode. In short, the idea of 'growing pains' is what created the show. And, funnily enough, a previous sitcom of the same name brought the two co-creators of The Wonder Years together and taught them exactly what they should do with their new project.

"We had done a television series [Growing Pains], and I think we learned a great deal from it," Neal Marlens said of his co-creator Carol Black in an interview with Rolling Stone. "We had what was called an overall deal at New World Television, so we were basically paid to sit there and think of projects that we wanted to do."

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It took some emotional deep-diving for Neal and Carol to come up with their show. Ultimately, it came from a recognition of their own growing pains as kids.

"I think the [creative] impetus came from our personal experience of having come of age in a period when there was so much turmoil in the world; and yet, the experience of being a middle-class suburban kid really wasn’t that much different than it was five or 10 years earlier. It’s just that it was in a whole new context as you got older and as the implications of that started to get closer and closer to home. It kind of stirred things up in a way that seemed like a really interesting time," Neal explained.

"We sat down and wrote the pilot, and then walked upstairs to [executive] John Feltheimer’s office and said, 'We’ve written this pilot. We think it’ll work as a series. How should we sell it?' ABC — with whom we had a pre-existing relationship because we had a series there before — was the first to say, 'We want to do this.' They were the only ones, actually," Neal continued.

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While the concept of the show was solid and, more importantly, the execution of the idea in the script was superb, Neal and Carol knew that its success landed on the shoulders of the young lead. Luckily, they had access to Fred Savage. The two co-creators had seen the virtually unknown star in a movie called Vica Versa and fell in love with him. While Fred's Chicago-based parents were reluctant to allow their kid to star in his very own L.A. sitcom, they fell in love with the script once they read it.

Danica McKellar and Fred Savage on The Wonder Years
via Pinterest/ABC

Why The Show Hit Home With Audiences

The same reason why The Wonder Years was created ultimately was why millions of viewers fell in love with it.

"The brilliance of Neal and Carol’s show, the original concept, was the ability of setting the very small stories of a 12-year-old living in the suburbs and setting it against these gigantic world events — not to mention the third dimension, which is the narrator seeing it from all these years later with an idea of how all these events turned out," Bob brush, who was an executive producer and a writer on the show, said to Rolling Stone.

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Using a narrator could have easily felt gimmicky -- after all, so many shows who have copied the formula from The Wonder Years just couldn't pull it off -- and yet Neal and Carol's show found a way to do it right. The choice gave a dimension to the coming-of-age story that it otherwise wouldn't have had... And that's the idea that our experience growing up has a weight and value of its own, despite all of the seemingly insurmountable darkness going on in the larger world.

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