That ‘90s Show is humanity’s return serve to AI
Derek Robertson
Here is an incomplete list of things That ‘90s Show, Netflix’s revival of the beloved Fox sitcom That ‘70s Show, invokes or indirectly asks the viewer to consider:
That ‘70s Show itself. The actual 1970s. The actual 1990s. Specific television shows (Ricki Lake, Beverly Hills 90210) from the 1990s. The general format of 1990s television, i.e., the multicamera sitcom. Finally, That ‘90s Show itself, via inexplicable and saccharine montage.
To quote another piece of backward-looking 1990s media, Oliver Stone’s JFK: We’re through the looking glass here, people.
The 10-episode first season of That ‘90s Show that premiered on Netflix recently is, yes, just another entry in the streaming era’s interminable parade of revivals and nostalgia bait (Cobra Kai, Fuller House, Girl Meets World). But it’s also something much more. It’s the first program to fully replicate by human hand the work of artificial intelligence-powered large learning models like ChatGPT and DALL-E, which have captured the public’s imagination by hoovering up the sum of human-generated data and then regurgitating it in a form eerily close to human craft but absent any spark or authorial fingerprint.
Let’s examine the show’s basic premise. Leia Forman, the precocious 14-year-old daughter of original series principals Eric and Donna (Topher Grace and Laura Prepon, both of whom appear in crowd-pleasing cameos), has returned to her parents’ fictional hometown of Point Place, Wisconsin, for a summer at the home of her grandparents (returning heavy-hitter character actors Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp). There she will live, laugh, love, and surreptitiously smoke marijuana in the basement with a wacky gang of local misfits. Just like the old days!
Which is the show’s major problem. It is both far too much like the “old days,” insomuch as in production, style, and constant wink-and-nudge reference, it is almost exactly like its source material — it was even filmed in front of a live studio audience! — and it is absolutely nothing like the old days; that is to say, real life. With the twin disclaimers that as a millennial smack in the middle of that generation’s age distribution, I was not a teenager in the 1990s and that the original That ‘70s Show was not exactly David Simon-like verite television, That ‘90s Show utterly fails at capturing anything like the adolescent experience that drove its predecessor, instead falling somewhere closer to the caffeinated antics of a live-action Disney Channel series.
In a certain light, the original That ‘70s Show was a cringeworthy pastiche of 1970s cultural tropes (Wide lapels! Swingers parties!) plastered on a relatively unoriginal will-they-won’t-they romantic plot between the aforementioned Eric and Donna. But it was also quite genuinely jarring and absurd at times in the live-action cartoonish vein of Fox’s comedy programming post-The Simpsons. And it featured a stacked cast of veterans and charismatic young actors who went on to become bona fide movie stars in their own right (Grace, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis). It became one of the most beloved and frequently streamed series on Netflix over the past decade for a reason.
None of this is likely to happen with That ‘90s Show, which is severely lacking in both the humor and charisma departments. Some of the blame for this can be ascribed to its premise: To an adult, an age differential of three or four years is paltry. To a teenager, it can be an eternity — which makes the writers’ choice to focus on a group of 14- and 15-year-olds baffling, centering the show on a bunch of teenagers who, halting talk of sex and unconvincing marijuana-smoking aside, feel decidedly like, well … teenagers. The faux cynicality, insecurity, and future anxiety of characters like the original show’s Eric and Hyde (Danny Masterson, who was decidedly not invited to join this revival amid a trial for rape) are replaced by juvenile gags about Tic Tacs and first kisses.
This is not necessarily surprising considering the algorithmic consideration that goes into Netflix’s production decisions. People love those Stranger Things kids, after all, and aren’t they just so gosh darn cute? But it breaks the show in several ways.
First, it’s simply obnoxious and unfunny to watch its young cast mug their collective way through the PG-13 subject matter. Second, the tone is hopelessly muddled as the show tries to balance the teenagers’ antics with those of the returning (and some new) adult cast. Third, it makes the show utterly toothless in its half-assed attempt to handle the modern-day social issues that are, seemingly by force of statute, projected on the show’s reality. An overweight gay Asian teenager in the 1990s in suburban Green Bay, Wisconsin, loudly proclaims his sexuality to a series of totally indifferent strangers before “agonizing” over his decision to come out to the Forman family matriarch with the level of concern usually deployed for a Taco Bell order. It’s not just that it’s unrealistic; it’s that it’s an insulting whitewash of what would have been an excruciating experience for a gay teenager born in such a place and time.
There are some redeeming qualities. Even the heart most hardened to nostalgia will have a hard time not grinning when Kutcher makes his cameo as one of television’s most iconic and beloved oafs. Smith still slings the term “dumbass” with a precision and elan comparable only to Samuel L. Jackson’s “motherf***er.” Maybe most surprisingly, the 1990s setting isn’t as beaten like a pinata for corny references and jokes as one might expect (notwithstanding a few egregious exceptions, including a mind-blowingly embarrassing attempt at conjuring a rave). And it simply feels good to be back in the Formans’ home, making the series modestly satisfying comfort viewing as long as you don’t pay too much attention.
But once you do, that edifice doesn’t crumble — it becomes something much more depressing. The aforementioned language models, for all their gee-whiz properties and infinite computational complexity, are at heart quite stupid. They can only do what users tell them to do, drawing from a pool of “content” that has already been generated by humans. “Draw Catherine the Great making out with Batman in the style of Salvador Dali,” you tell it, and there it is roughly. “Write me a poem about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ divisional loss to the Dallas Cowboys that compares Tom Brady to Ozymandias,” you tell it, and there’s your potential ticket to virality.
That ‘90s Show performs the same parlor trick: “Write me a multicamera sitcom that recreates the premise of That ‘70s Show but updated to feature that series’ characters and their offspring during the decade when the original show aired, yet with the social mores and sensibilities of the current day.” Your content is served.
Which makes the show not only unenjoyable but a fundamentally disorienting hall of Barthesian mirrors. The laugh track, the interstitials, the music, the decor, and the callbacks all distract the viewer from the void at its center. The kids are cute, sure, and, bless their hearts, they’re trying their best. But they don’t have a thing to do except play-act at pre-internet culture while hitting the marks that Netflix’s world-bestriding algorithm says will maximize returns. That ‘90s Show is, yes, just another streaming sitcom, and hardly anything could seem so trivial. Yet it’s hard to imagine anything more demoralizing than today’s actual children and teenagers growing up in a cultural desert full of its brand of soulless capital-C Content.
Derek Robertson is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine. Find him at Afternoondelete.com.