“Happy Days” portrayed the 1950s when the 1950s weren’t even 20 years in the past. Last week saw the premieres of two new series, “Quantum Leap” and “Reboot,” that explore similar territory.
For kids in the 1970s the biggest star in the world was Henry Winkler, who played The Fonz on Happy Days. The show was set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in roughly 1955, so when it premiered in 1974 the era it depicted was less than 20 years in the rear view mirror.
It’s bracing to do the math and realize that if a new TV show were set 19 years in the past today, that year would be 2003. (I own tee shirts that I bought before 2003!)
Happy Days was a show for the whole family, but adults and kids had different experiences. If you were the parents of young children, then Happy Days took you back to something akin to your own teen years: an exercise in nostalgia.
If you were a young child, then the first vision you had of the 1950s was through the lens of a sitcom that created an inaccessible pastoral fantasy of a world that never really existed but seemed idyllic. This is pseudo-nostalgia, where you long to return to a place that you’ve never actually been.
When I say that the Milwaukee of Happy Days never really existed, what I mean is that in real life the 1950s were a decade of immense transformation in that city: the black population increased from 21,772 to 62,458 with tension growing between the new arrivals and the majority white established families. None of that is visible in Happy Days, a show in which there were almost no black characters over its 11 seasons.
Two shows premiered last week that were exercises in nostalgia and pseudo-nostalgia: Quantum Leap on NBC and Reboot on Hulu.
Quantum Leap: The original Quantum Leap (1989-93) perpetrated one of the great narrative betrayals of my life as a TV viewer. For five seasons, every episode started with a voiceover explaining the conceit of the show: Dr. Sam Becket was time traveling through history to set right what once went wrong, always hoping that his next leap “would be the leap home.” Then, in the series finale, the last thing shown was a line of text saying, “Dr. Sam Becket never returned home.” Arrgh! This still frosts me nearly 30 years later.
I later learned that there were external reasons for this betrayal: the studio canceled the show after the finale was already in the can. But it was still a mistake. Had the text read, “Dr. Sam Becket eventually returned home,” then I would not have felt like I’d watched nearly 100 episodes of a bait-and-switch.
The end of the original Quantum Leap is the beginning of the new series that premiered last Monday. Decades later, Dr. Ben Song thinks he can rescue Sam Becket. Song uses the Quantum Leap accelerator to follow Becket into the time stream, where he now finds himself helping people in the same way.
For fans of the original series like me, this is powerful nostalgia because—in a crazy meta exercise—it has the potential to put right what went wrong in the original finale: bring Sam home! (My spirits were a bit dashed to learn that Scott Bakula, the actor who played Sam, has no plans to return.) For people who never watched the original series either on broadcast or in reruns, this is pseudo-nostalgia where you’re hoping the team rescues somebody in whom you have zero emotional investment.
The pilot of the new Quantum Leap was fun, and I’ll tune in for Episode #2, but the differences between the two shows were quickly apparent. The original had only two regular characters: Scott Bakula as Sam and the late Dean Stockwell as Al, the helper from Sam’s own time who appears as a hologram only Sam can see. The two regular characters were both white guys, even though the 97 scenarios into which Sam leaped were diverse with many guest stars.
The new show has a large cast: Ben Song (Raymond Lee) is the leaper, and Addison Augustine (Caitlin Basset) is the hologram. Herbert “Magic” Williams (Ernie Hudson) is the military lead of Addison’s support team; Ian Wright (Mason Alexander Park) is the other scientist, and Jenn Chou (Nanrisa Lee) is the project’s head of security. The show has bitten off a lot of characters to develop on top of the “what to set right” dilemma of each episode with all those guest stars. The race politics of the cast will appeal to Liberals like me (two Asians, a white woman, a black man, and a white nonbinary person), but regardless of your politics that’s a lot of characters to manage. The new show’s structure is more like one of the Star Trek series, with a crew visiting a new planet each week, than like the original Quantum Leap.
Reboot: The conceit here is that Hannah, a young TV writer (Rachel Bloom), pitches getting the original cast of an early 2000s sitcom, “Step Right Up,” to continue their characters’ stories, but she wants to turn the saccharine original into an edgy dark comedy.
There was no “Step Right Up” in real life, although the title is a nod to Step by Stepfrom the 1990s, so this is pseudo-nostalgia.
Reboot is a fictional version of actual reboots like Mad About You (originally in 1992; reboot in 2019) and And Just Like That (rebooting 1998’s Sex & the City in 2021) that reunited some or all of the original casts to play their old characters.
One intriguing way that Reboot deploys actual nostalgia into its pseudo-nostalgia is through its cast choices. Paul Reiser, who created and starred in both the original and reboot of Mad About You, plays Gordon, the producer of the original “Step Right Up.” Gordon is in tension with Hannah. Johnny Knoxville, who plays Clay, one of the parents in “Step Right Up,” got his big break as the star of Jackass on MTV in 2000… and Clay is a bit of a jackass (at least in the first episode). So even though the characters aren’t familiar, they feel familiar because of the actors playing them.
Reboot is fun, and I look forward to digging into more episodes as Hulu releases them.
What, I wonder, will constitute nostalgia and pseudo-nostalgia for young people today who spend more time looking at TikTok videos and Instagram Reels than half and full hour TV programs? Is it possible to create an Experience Stack about a meme?
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