Thirtysomething Hits DVD— But Is It Still Good?

Thirtysomething is finally on DVD, much to the excitement of baby boomers everywhere—and Seth Stevenson, who, inexplicably, loved the show as a 14-year-old boy. “I wondered: Would I find it even more compelling now that I’d actually reached my 30s?” he writes for Slate. But, though the performances are top-notch and the “late-‘80s fashions are exquisite,” Stevenson ultimately found the “nano-level dissection of the domestic lives of hypereducated white urbanites” tedious.

“The quality never dips, but the cumulative ordinariness of the show’s world gradually becomes unbearable,” he continues. “It turns out I don’t want to flip on my TV on a Tuesday night to watch an excruciating exegesis of quotidian stresses. I prefer to watch the kind of story that takes me far, far away, into an unfamiliar universe—of mobsters, or Baltimore police officers, or, yes, even people stranded on a spooky island.” (More thirtysomething stories.)