Running simultaneously with the original Wonder Years, this show complements the original show from the late 1980s, with the same name, from a Black American perspective. Actor and director Fred Savage helps produce this version--he also played the original titular character on The Wonder Years.
At the beginning of the series, Dean and Brad's middle school is desegregated but still maintains the name of the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, complete with a Confederate statue outside the school. However, there was a real Montgomery public school called Jefferson Davis High School until July 2020, when the Montgomery school board voted to remove his name from the school (as well as the names of two other Confederate figures, Robert E. Lee and Sidney Lanier, from other city schools). Lee High did have a statue of its namesake, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, until June 2020--when demonstrators removed it in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd. The school that showrunner Saladin K. Patterson attended was named after a successful African American businessman and community leader, Henry Loveless (1854-1921), a founding member of the landmark Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (later Dr. Martin Luther King's pulpit and a center of the civil rights movement).
In the "Lads & Ladies & Us" episode, Dean's best friend, Cory tries to use a fact about Pluto to pick-up a girl. The narrator says "Cory was probably the only kid in the world who could make a pick-up line about Pluto work." The actor that plays Dean's father, Dulè Hill was a main character on Psych (2006). Multiple times in the show, his character used the pick-up line "Did you hear about Pluto?"
The song Bill and his band perform, "With a Little Help from My Friends," is the theme song of the original series, The Wonder Years (1988).
Saladin K. Patterson, the series's creator and showrunner, grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where this show's setting is. According to a September 2021 Montgomery Advertiser article by Mandy Hoskison, Patterson is a 1990 graduate of Montgomery's public magnet school, LAMP (Loveless Academic Magnet Program).