The Wonder Years (Seasons 1–2)

The Wonder Years (2021) is ABC's coming-of-age drama series you can watch online on iFILM. Twelve-year-old Dean Williams narrates his own childhood from the vantage point of adulthood — his older self voiced by Don Cheadle. The setting is Montgomery, Alabama, late 1960s: a Black middle-class family finding their footing in a country mid-upheaval.

The show covers the familiar territory of adolescence — schoolyard politics, first crushes, parent trouble — but grounds it in a specific time and place that most coming-of-age stories have left untold. Elisha Williams plays Dean with warmth and real comedic timing, and the writing never reaches for easy lessons. Created by Saladin K. Patterson, the series is inspired by the classic 1988 original while telling an entirely different story.

What makes it work is restraint. It trusts nostalgia without drowning in it, and that balance is harder to pull off than it looks. Stream all episodes of The Wonder Years online on iFILM.