(The laugh track audience begins to chuckle. “It’s okay to be confused,” Buddy counsels. Buddy asks if she’s his girlfriend, and Eric sighs, “I don’t know.” The big scene begins with Eric realizing he forgot to call Donna. Something must be amiss! And we learn exactly what that is when Buddy kisses Eric. (A chipper montage shows them jump high-five over playing pinball, sucking at basketball, and buying weed.) Meanwhile, Jackie is disturbed because someone as uncool as Eric shouldn’t be able to make a clique jump this grand. When he starts buddying up to his lab partner Buddy Morgan (Gordon-Levitt), Hyde and Kelso are pissed, mostly because instead of driving them home from school in his station wagon, he’s riding around with his cooler, richer, more popular doppelganger with the matching floppy haircut.
Before long though, I was revolted at how low the bar was not so long ago.Īiring on December 6th, 1998, the episode titled “Eric’s Buddy” centered on Eric Foreman (Grace) making a friend outside his basement-dwelling clique. Hanging out, channel surfing, I stumbled across a That ’70s Show rerun that caught my eye, because hey! Isn’t that teenaged Joseph Gordon-Levitt showing off his rad car to Topher Grace? I didn’t remember the ep, so I settled in over my cereal, not realizing I was revisiting a groundbreaking moment in gay representation on television.
