I wasn’t much of a fan of the 1970s while I was growing up. We went from hippie sensibility to disco distraction, impeached a president, suffered through an oil embargo, and the clothes and hair basically sucked big time (hmm... history really does repeat itself), but there was a gem of a TV show that brought back my own pleasant memories of coming of age in the late disco area.

No, it wasn’t The Wonder Years, although that show was a fairly accurate depiction of life in the early '70s. The program I’m referring to is That ‘70s Show.

Originally airing on FOX in 1998, That 70s Show starred Topher Grace as the nerdy Eric Forman, Ashton Kutcher as the terminally attention-deficit Michael Kelso, Danny Masterson as the burn-out, radical-thinking Steven Hyde, Mila Kunis as the shallow, cheerleading Jackie Burkhart, Wilmar Valderrama as perverted foreign exchange student Fez, Laura Prepon as Eric’s dream girl next door Donna Pinciotti, Kurtwood Smith as Eric’s scary father, Red Forman, and Debra Jo Rupp as Eric’s kooky mother, Kitty. That '70s Show ran for eight seasons and spawned a successful transition to the big time for Ashton Kutcher (also known as Mr. Demi Moore).

There were several reasons why I (and my husband) really liked the show. For one thing, we spent the late 1970s growing up in the Twin Cities. Instead of going through the trials and tribulations of high school, both of us were in college, which made us a little older than the kids on the show.

Still, we shared many of the same situations visited by That ‘70s Show. We both had that burn-out, radical thinking, pot-smoking friend. We both knew that nerdy kid next door who was in love with a beauty, and we both watched the wallpaper dance while our parents yelled at us.

While Minnesota is not quite Point Place, that fictional small town somewhere outside of Green Bay (was it Oshkosh, Appleton, Baraboo, Beaver Dam? — we still don’t know), it shares the same quaint Midwestern charm as its cheese-headed neighbors to the east.

When That ‘70s Show was originally released, we weren’t watching FOX sitcoms. At the time, we were watching the funny guys on Comedy Central. We have since made up for this omission and have purchased all of the DVDs of the shows. I consider the first few seasons to be some of the golden moments of television.

Even though the depiction of a Wisconsin winter wasn’t exactly accurate (I seem to remember being buried under many feet of snow back then), the characters were totally believable. I’m not the kind who looks at trade magazines, so I don’t know for sure, but I got the feeling that everyone genuinely liked each other and had a great time being in the show - this from the barely contained snickering that could be seen in the background.

Ah, but the lifetime of a good sitcom is fairly short-lived. It’s hard to come up with something new and exciting for eight long years. I could feel the disintegration of the show long before season eight.