ABC has shared the first full-length trailer for its upcoming reboot of The Wonder Years. Watch it below.
Centered around a Black family in Montgomery, Alabama, the coming of age series stars EJ Williams as 12-year-old Dean, with narration by Don Cheadle as Dean’s older self. “Twelve was the age I was gonna figure out what my bag was. I’d never be as popular as my sister, as smart as my mom, or as bad as my dad,” Cheadle narrates, introducing Dean’s family played, respectively, by Laura Kariuki as sister Kim, Saycon Sengbloh as mother Lillian, and Dulé Hill as father Bill.
Set in the year 1968, the show will also tackle important topics of the time such as school segregation along with universal middle school foibles like bullying, locker room anxiety, and first crushes. (“Some people didn’t feel like we needed to mix Black people with white people — I didn’t understand all that,” Cheadle says. “But I decided what my bag would be: the great uniter.”)
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As a cover of Joe Cocker’s seminal “With a Little Help From My Friends” plays over top, the trailer shows Dean rallying his friends and family to help desegregate his Little League, with his Black team playing a game against the white team.
The Wonder Years is slated to premiere September September 22nd on ABC, with streaming available the day after each episode on Hulu. Watch the trailer for the feel-good series below.
A reimagining of the classic 1988 series starring Fred Savage, Danica McKellar, Dan Lauria, and Daniel Stern, ABC first ordered the new iteration of The Wonder Years in July 2020 with Lee Daniels serving as an executive producer and Savage set to direct the pilot episode. A shorter first look at the show also dropped in May.
