Opinion: ‘WandaVision’ plays games with sitcom tropes, takes a risk post-rerun generation won’t get the gag

If you spent any kind of time in front of the television during your childhood and you’re over the age of 40, you’ll recognize the TV tropes — and in some instances, the specific shows — referenced in the new Marvel series “WandaVision” on Disney+.

In the early going, the show eschews your typical superhero storyline in favor of something cheeky and bizarre, plunking down two MCU characters — the magically inclined Wanda Maximoff and her android beau Vision — into various sitcom templates of old. The first episode (and much of the second) is in black-and-white, and it hearkens back to everything from “I Love Lucy” of the 1950s to “The Dick Van Dyke Show” of the early 1960s, plus a good dose of the original “Twilight Zone.”

Advancing chronologically, the show adds in references from “Bewitched,” which ran from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s, and subsequent episodes will advance the timeline through the decades. So far it’s been a hoot.

Anyone old enough to have seen these old shows in their original runs (or watched them decades later in afternoon syndication) will be familiar with the formats and stylistic gewgaws that “WandaVision” is playing with. Without that awareness, though, will audiences — specifically of people in their teens and maybe 20s — find the whole thing perplexing and off-puttingly niche?

On Twitter, the London-based writer Catherine Queen gave voice to that wariness: “This strikes me as such an odd experiment. How much crossover is there between MCU and classic sitcom fans? I’m not an MCU fan but I am an adult in my mid-30s and I wouldn’t recognize any elements of ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ or ‘I Love Lucy’ etc., because I’m too young to know them.”

This presents a challenge for a show like “WandaVision.” The intense artificiality of any sitcom is strange enough to begin with, and all of that becomes even stranger when you add in a pair of game, if supremely confused, Marvel characters who are trying to suss out the bizarro suburban fantasia they suddenly inhabit as husband and wife. “Pleasantville,” from 1998, riffed on many of these same themes, starring Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire as 90s-era teens trapped in the faux idyllic world of a 50s sitcom. Notably, the movie came out years before younger audiences started forgoing TV in favor of YouTube and anything else the internet has to offer.

So if the mode of delivery, reruns, has changed, how are post-rerun generations learning about pop culture that predates them — if they’re learning about it at all?

You could ask that about everything from music to movies, but let’s focus on television. There’s no shortage of cable channels in the business of TV classic, from MeTV to TVLand to the Nick at Nite programming block on Nickelodeon.

But those daily schedules may as well exist in another dimension if you haven’t “watched TV” in the traditional channel-flipping sense … ever. I think Marvel is banking that at least some younger audiences will have an awareness. So what’s going on?

Brett Neveu is a senior lecturer at Northwestern University, where he teaches screenwriting, and based on his experiences talking with undergrads, he has a couple of theories.

“Video games are one,” he said. “Fallout and Cuphead use the genre to lay clues, so if you want to know what the hell is going on, you’re going to search out that information. Fallout is a game that’s been around for a long time and there’s different variations, but it’s set in a post-nuclear war future where only the pop culture that has remained behind is from the 1950s. So the jokes that are in the game, the references, they are all part of a culture that is long gone. And if you invest in this puzzle, you have to know these reference points.”

So people are hitting pause to search the internet? “Yeah, if it helps them win the game!”

And Neveu thinks this is how some people will watch “WandaVision” as well, driven by a desire to unearth those small, winking details (aka Easter eggs) that Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers will clock on sight.

Consider: Wanda and Vision sleep in separate twin beds, just like Lucy and Ricky — a specific trope courtesy of ’50s-era network standards that were too squeamish to portray a married couple sharing the same bed and … heaven forbid, imply they’re also having sex in that bed. (“WandaVision” jokes around with the subtext of that trope, too.) When the footage in Episode 2 transforms from black-and-white into color, the shift doesn’t just underscore the weirdness of Wanda and Vision’s world, but functions as a callback to every 1960s sitcom that was initially shot in black-and-white, only to switch to color in later seasons. As “WandaVision” barrels into the ’70s, the groovy interior design of the couple’s home is happily reminiscent of “The Brady Bunch,” down the distinctive staircase railing.

It’s not that the show is unenjoyable if you don’t notice these touches. But they so clearly function as part of the experience. All of this is phony, the show seems to be saying, but in distinctive ways depending on the era, and isn’t it fun to tweak these quirks and tropes? Isn’t it worthwhile to reflect on Hollywood’s surreal concept of what family life is meant to look like? By setting “WandaVision” within the unreality of a sitcom, show creator Jac Schaeffer is both honoring that TV history while also exploring just how twisted and false the premise of these shows really are.

Neveu said there’s another way old shows are getting in front of younger eyes: TikTok.

“There’s a lot of borrowing of pop culture just from anywhere on the internet, and that includes TV clips but also theme songs,” he said. “I think it’s just so hard to produce new content that a lot of people on TikTok are looking around like, there’s all this content that already exists, what can I do with that?”

So unlike previous generations passively consuming syndicated shows because they were simply there, younger generations are making an active choice to dig back through time, link after link, clip after clip, falling down the proverbial internet rabbit hole. The ability to punch anything into a search engine has created a culture of curiosity.

Plenty of older shows are now available on various streaming platforms. They’re easy to find. But are younger viewers really going to seek them out because of “WandaVision”?

“Yes, I can see that happening, only because they need context,” said Neveu. “Because everybody’s going to be talking about it. They’re going to read articles about the show and they want to be able to speak knowledgeably about this stuff.

“I know for a fact that people this age are doing that kind of research,” he said. “We’ve all turned into students of media and context is everything. So if you can gather more information, then you’re more emotionally engaged, and that’s what these students are looking for.” Everybody’s paying attention to the clues, he said. Everyone wants that feeling of: Oh, I get it.

Here’s another thought: Younger generations may have abandoned TV in its traditional cable-and-broadcast sense, but maybe they’ll discover it (and these older shows) through PlutoTV. Kristen Lopez recently wrote about the free streaming service for IndieWire, noting that it mimics the network model of “scheduled programming and commercials, but couches it within the streaming world of uncensored offerings, channels dedicated to specific content, and on-demand titles.” It’s a place to find “Happy Days,” “Mork & Mindy,” “The Love Boat,” “Laverne & Shirley” and more.

But wait, maybe I’m forgetting the ways parents expose their kids to older pop culture.

Milan Polk, 22, is a Northwestern University alum who interned at the Chicago Tribune over the summer.

“We watched a lot of classic TV shows growing up with my parents,” she said. “And when my grandparents came over especially, we watched a lot of TVLand. So I’ve seen little bit of ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ and also ‘Sanford and Son,’ but we also owned the entire box set of ‘I Love Lucy.’” Polk wasn’t seeking out these shows, but was exposed to them nevertheless thanks to her family. “So I was grandfathered into the rerun culture,” she said.

“Later shows like ‘That’s So Raven’ and ‘Drake & Josh’ (both from the early 2000s) referenced ‘I Love Lucy’ a lot — like, the friends go and do some crazy scheme that’s like the chocolate episode from ‘Lucy’ — so those things stood out to me. But at the same time I knew friends who had no idea these were references from a previous TV show.”

Polk echoed Neveu’s theory about the influence of TikTok. “I think there are kids on TikTok who seek this stuff out because there is an interest in knowing older references.” And those videos essentially work as a teaser for anyone who might be compelled to start researching on their own. “The whole idea of algorithms means that we kind of have to be active searchers to find new things that are interesting.”

But there’s a legitimate reason older shows might turn off younger viewers encountering them for the first time: They represented such a narrow, homogenous slice of American life. These were TV series greenlit by white male executives, made by white producers and, for the most part, starring white casts adhering to rigid heteronormative standards.

“That’s also huge,” said Polk. “That’s definitely something that can deter a lot of people, especially younger people of color, from looking into these things. So while we may have ‘I Love Lucy,’ it’s probably not as interesting as the (early ’90s sketch show) ‘In Living Color’ or (the late 90s sitcom) ‘Moesha,’ the latter of which is having a resurgence because now it’s on Netflix. So people are definitely looking for things that are more toward their interests and not just accepting what’s being given to them.”

There’s yet another way people in their late teens and early 20s are being exposed to older TV content and that’s through college classes. One of the courses Neveu teaches at Northwestern is writing for procedurals.

“I showed my class ‘Dragnet,’ ‘Barney Miller’ and ‘Hill Street Blues’ and they were really digging into it,” he said. “It’s weird, because 10 years ago they laughed a lot more at these shows. Like, why are you showing us this, it’s old. But that’s changed. They don’t laugh hardly at all anymore. They get my desire for them to investigate.

“Before these older shows were just a thing. But now there’s a purpose to it. They’re drawing connections from the way those shows were made to the things they’re watching now.”