It's a wonderful life

In the winter of 1988, after millions of viewers watched the Washington Redskins beat the Denver Broncos to win the Super Bowl, ABC aired the pilot episode of a new show called The Wonder Years. The show, about suburban life and adolescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, followed Kevin Arnold and his family, best friend Paul Pfeiffer, and his first love, Winnie Cooper, played by actress Danica McKellar. McKellar was barely 13 when the show started, and when it ended six seasons later, she decided to take a break from acting and go to college. She enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she planned to major in film, thinking she'd try her hand at writing and directing. "But I felt my brain getting mushy," she says. "So I decided to take a calculus class, to see if it would make my brain feel sharper."