The show thirtysomething spearheaded ABC's drive to reach a demographically younger and culturally more capital-rich audience. Cover stories in Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly explored the parallels between the actors' and characters' lives, as well as the rapport the program generated with its audience, who were seen as sharing the characters' inner conflicts. Michael Steadman, an advertising copywriter struggling with the claims of his liberal Jewish background, and his wife Hope, a part-time journalist and activist and a full-time mother, were the "settled" couple. The Steadmans were contrasted with Elliot, a not-really­ grown-up graphic artist who was Michael"s best friend at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elliot's long­ suffering wife Nancy, an illustrator who separated from him and developed ovarian cancer in subsequent seasons. Three unmarried friends also dating back from college days complete the roster of characters: Ellyn, a career executive in city government: Gary, English teacher at a liberal arts college: and Melissa, a freelance photographer and Michael's cousin. While the two couples wrestled with their marriages and raising their children, the three others had a series of love affairs with outsiders to the circle. For Gary, after a quasi-incestuous relation with Melissa, fate held a child out of wedlock with a temperamental feminist named Susanna: failure to win tenure at the college: life as a househusband: and, finally, in one of the series' most publicized episodes, sudden death in an automobile accident.

The title, referring to the age of the characters, was written as one word (to represent "togetherness") and in lower case (to evoke e.e. cummings and the refusal of authority). "Real life is an acquired taste" was the network promo for the series, as its makers explored the boundaries between soap operatics and verisimilitude, between melodrama and realism. Co-creators Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (who had met at the American Film Institute) claimed a "mandate of small moments examined closely," dealing with "worlds of incremental change" loosely modeled on their own lives and those of their friends. Central to Zwick and Herskovitz's sense of this fictional world was a high degree of self-consciousness and media awareness. "Very Big Chill... as one character put it, referring to Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 film. That movie was often seen as a progenitor of the series, defining a generation through its nostalgia for its fancy-free days before adulthood. The Big Chill focus on a "reunion of friends" in turn refers to the small-budget film Return of the Secaucus Seven made by John Sayles in 1980. Yet another touchstone for the cinematically literate makers of thirtysomething was Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the perennial favorite of American moviegoers, to which homage was paid in the production company's "Bedford Falls" logo. Capra's political liberalism emerged in the series in the distaste for patriarchal and capitalist power (with that power embodied in Miles, the ruthless CEO of the advertising company where Michael and Elliot worked), while a film aesthetic carried over into the series’ cine­matography, intertextual references, and ambitious storylines, which occasionally incorporated flashbacks, daydream, and fantasy sequences. This complex mixture of cinematic and cultural antecedents can be summed up by suggesting that in many ways thirty­ something’s four seasons brought the sophistication of Woody Allen's films to the small screen.

Although in the vanguard for centering on "new" (postfeminist) men, for privileging "female truth," and for dealing with touchy issues within sexual relations as well as with disease and death, the series never really challenged gender roles. It is true that the problem of the domestication of men, of defining them within a familial role without lessening their desirability and their sense of self-fulfillment, was one of the series’ key preoccupations, but thirtysomething ultimately endorsed the traditional sexual division of labor. Although it was the first series to show a homosexual couple in bed together, the series posed any alternative to the heterosex­ ual couple very gingerly. Nevertheless, the prominence of a therapeutic discourse, and the negotiation of identity in the postmodern era, won thirtysomething accolades from professional psychologists.

The series was occasionally criticized, too, for its social and political insularity, for not dealing with problems outside the affluent lifestyle and 1960s values of its characters. Zwick and Herskovitz described it as "a show about creating your own family. All these people live apart from where they grew up. and so they're trying to fashion a new sense of home--one made up of friends, where holidays, job triumphs, illnesses, and gossip all take on a kind of bittersweet significance."

The series' influence was evident long after it moved to syndication on the Lifetime cable network and its creators moved on to feature-film careers and other television series. That in Huence can be noted in the look and sound of certain TV advertisements, in other series with feminine sensibilities and preoccupations with the transition from childhood to maturity (Sisters), and in situation comedies about groups of friends who talk all the time the subjectivity principle to a teenage girl caught between her family and school friends. That series was perhaps an indication of a new shift in the targeting of "genera­tional audiences," the new focus now on "twentysomethings," as television searched for a way to reach the offspring of the baby boomers.