The Wonder Years was my favorite show as a kid, and it still ranks way at the top among other shows I’ve come to love over the years.
It’s a punch of nostalgia with great story-telling, great acting, the best comedic voice of Daniel Stern, who is the narrator looking back on his life. That show never fails to make me laugh and cry, though the ending, while well-done, was not what many fans were hoping for.
Actress Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on the show, has spoken out about the ending all these years later, offering those disgruntled viewers some hope.
In the final episode, which aired May 12, 1993, the narrator revealed that Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) and Winnie did not end up together, despite their on-again off-again relationship throughout the series. She went to Paris to get her art degree and Kevin got married to someone else, but the pair remained friends.
“Fans still get upset about it,” McKellar said on the Nov. 25 episode of “Pod Meets World.” She explained that often in the show, “everything didn’t all work out in the end,” which was a way to be relatable to the audience.
She went on: “Most of our lives don’t out the way we wanted them too, or thought they were going to, so in that same way, Kevin and Winnie did not end up together.
“I like to say though, look. All we know is what the narrator said happened… He had a baby with his wife and they were the first to greet me off the plane. That’s only the beginning of the story.
“Personally, I am divorced and remarried and a lot of people are. Maybe Kevin and Winnie ended up together after all.”
At the time of the series’ end, executive producer Bob Brush reflected on the ending, which made some fans upset. He told the Los Angeles Times in 1993:
“Some viewers will be surprised that nothing works out the way your fondest wish would be. The message I wanted in there is that that’s part of the beauty of life.
“It’s fine to say, ‘I’d like everything to be just the way it was when I was 15 and I was happy,’ but it seemed more nurturing to me to say that we leave these things behind and we go on to forge new lives for ourselves.”
I wanted to see Kevin and Winnie end up together as much as anyone. My own parents met in Jr. High School in the 60s, so this story felt so familiar and correct to me. When they didn’t end up married in the finale, I was sad.
But, experiencing my own life as an adult who ended up marrying someone who was not my own high school sweetheart, I get it now. We can’t see what the future holds when we are young, and sometimes what lies ahead is even better than what we had to leave behind.
via: Variety
