Blossom

In our opinionation, more than 20 years after the beloved sitcom went off the air, it's never looked fresher.

- Darren Franich

IT'S HARD TO WATCH BLOSSOM TODAY Not because the series has aged poorly. Actually, 22 years after we last saw Blossom Russo (Mayim Bialik) and her thoroughly modern family, the show still feels ahead of its time. In the days before every high school had a vampire or a pop-star secret identity or whatever’s up at Riverdale High, Blossom was a quiet pioneer in teen programming, a quirky-serious bridge from frothy Saved by the Bell and cutesy Full House to moody My So-Called Life and wry Daria. The only thing old-fashioned about Blossom is its analogera inaccessibility. All those other series are streaming somewhere—and the copulation of nostalgia and Netflix hells pawned Fuller House unto our world. But you will look in vain for any of the five seasons of Blossom on the major portals.

“We fell into some sort of black hole of TV history,” says Bialik. “We never went to the Emmys. We weren’t nominated for things.” Her costar, onscreen middle child and teen idol Joey Lawrence, characterizes the show as “surprisingly hard to find”— though the most enduring episodes of Blossom remain popular, at least in memory, thanks to the show’s embrace of the “very special episode.”

Bialik admits she didn’t even know about the phrase until four years ago. “That was something [they used] in commercials,” she explains. “They’d say, ‘Tonight, on a very special Blossom…’”

“I didn’t know that,” says Jenna von Oy, who played Blossom’s fast-talking best friend, Six.

“It was the marketing,” explains Ted Wass, who was family patriarch Nick Russo.