That 70’s Show was a popular sitcom in the early 2000s which hit the sweet spot between 70’s nostalgia and 90’s self-aware humor. With many references to 70’s pop culture like Star Wars and the cartoon Super Friends, the show made stars out of a lot of its cast members, including Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Topher Grace, and Wilmer Valderrama.
Recently, Valderrama, who played the foreign exchange student Fez trying to get used to strange American ways, teased the possibility of a reunion, saying:
“We’ve talked about it… Maybe it’s That ’70s Movie, but it takes place in the ’90s? Where are they now? Or maybe the late ’80s might be kind of funny too. I don’t know, there’s nothing creatively in the works, but we talked about it. We thought it’d be really fun, and funny, because the tone of That ’70s Show could lend itself for something very forward-thinking.”
With so many old popular sitcoms finding new life on streaming services, including Fuller House and Roseanne, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine the gang from Point Break, Wisconsin, making some sort of a comeback, now with a whole new set of references for a new decade. The biggest obstacle to such reunions is usually the reluctance of cast members who’ve moved on to other roles to make a return. In this case, both Kutcher and Kunis have built successful Hollywood careers and coming back to characters they portrayed decades ago would feel like a step back.
It’s also important to remember that the series did already have a continuation of sorts, in the form of That ’80s Show, an ill-fated spinoff that followed a similar conceit to the original, and was canceled after only 13 episodes. If the reunion special does take place in the manner Valderrama describes, it’s unlikely to have the same vibe as the original, since That 70’s Show was, at its heart, about the follies of youth and the friends who become your family during your school years.
Catching up with the same characters a couple of decades later will offer a drastically different dynamic, with the new issues centering around jobs, marriages, and parenthood instead of parties, proms, and college applications. And whether that would work as well as the original series did is certainly up for debate.