I vividly remember, as a child, listening to Atomic Kitten’s hits “Eternal Flame” and “The Tide is High”, and my father loudly complaining that “all songs these days are covers”. Well, the child is father of the man, as William Wordsworth might say, and after seeing The Addams Family, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and, now, That ’70s Show rebooted for modern audiences, I have become my father. “Why did you open our house to chaos?” asks Kurtwood Smith’s cantankerous grandpa, Red, as Netflix’s That ’90s Show begins. “Again!?” That, Red, is a question for the studio executives.
We’re back in Point Place, Wisconsin, some time towards the end of the Nineties. Eric and Donna (Topher Grace and Laura Prepon) have, in the invisible Eighties, had a daughter, Leia (Callie Haverda). Over the course of a summer spent back with her grandparents (Debra Jo Rupp returns as Kitty opposite Smith’s Red) in Wisconsin, Leia finds herself falling in with a gang of slacker teenagers: cool girl Gwen (Ashley Aufderheide) and her brother Nate (Maxwell Acee Donovan), Nate’s smart-arse girlfriend Nikki (Sam Morelos), smoothie Jay (Mace Coronel), and acerbic genius Ozzie (Reyn Doi). Together, they are going to spend the vacation in Kitty and Red’s basement, surrounded by an ambiguous fog, the trademark swivelling camera locking on to their glazed eyes and goofy smiles.
