For today’s teenagers, nothing is cooler than the stuff that was cool 30 years ago. Tamagotchis. Flip phones. Keanu Reeves. Across TikTok, young people born long after the millennium are creating videos imagining “being a teenager in the Nineties”. Dancing to Alice Deejay club mixes, they envisage a wonderful, remote age of “no social media,” “no meaningless distractions,” “just you and your friends talking for hours”. Three decades on, the cultural products that came to define the Nineties have taken on a new glow: the rosy hue of nostalgia. Curious, alluring, strange. As one TikTokker put it, “it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. But it’s nice to think about it that way.”
This week, yet another show that was a cultural touchstone in the Nineties and early Noughties is “returning” to screens in spin-off form. That ’70s Show – the coming of age sitcom set in Seventies Wisconsin – is now That ’90s Show. Basement-dwelling, weed-smoking teens remain, but instead of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis adorned with bell bottoms and feathered hair, now the Point Place adolescents – and the kids of the original show’s leads – are donning checked shirts and backwards baseball caps, and drinking out of red Solo cups. The Independent’s Nick Hilton has already dubbed it “edgeless and unthreatening”, while another critic called it “a nostalgia turducken” – the Seventies nostalgia that launched the original show now layered within nostalgia for that show and for the era when it first aired, like a series of birds stuffed in bigger birds.
