As Lazy Sunday ushered in the beginning YouTube era, it sparked the conclusion of the feeling of “you gotta watch this live or get left behind.” Sure, in the past few decades people had recorded shows on VHS and then on TiVo but now, someone who hadn’t could also witness something they’d missed in real time. The video also put a number of other things on the map (or, at least, amplified them): Andy Samberg his Lonely Island troupe comedy rap that takes production and performance seriously the start of SNL‘s, and much of televised comedy’s, evolution into a focus on individually-sharable video clips adults going to see The Chronicles of Narnia.īut I’m going to focus here on a more conceptual piece of shrapnel the from Lazy Sunday detonation: The end of collective pop culture experiences.
Lazy Sunday now gets a deserved chunk of credit for putting YouTube on the map. But like the heads on a hydra (yes, we’re switching from a whack-a-mole analogy to a hydra analogy, that’s not poor writing, I’m just living my life a quarter mile at a time), when one copy would go down, three more would take its place. Instead, they entered into a game of whack-a-mole with YouTube, frantically trying to squash the shared copies of Lazy Sunday. NBC didn’t exactly embrace the viral hit they had on their hands.
#90S NOSTALGIA FOR FREE#
well, '80s nostalgia.2005 was well before every late-night comedy show (and, eventually, TV show) shared its best clips for free online quite the opposite, in fact. Another thing that was inescapable in the early '00s was. A wacky workplace sitcom set in a 2003 airport that leaves out the rampant paranoia and racism of the era would lead to a thousand think pieces about how it must be set in an alternate reality where the Twin Towers are still standing. It's a lose-lose situation: if shows joke about or trivialize the famously terrible parts of '00s life, they risk coming off as insensitive (it's still "too soon" for some people), but trying to ignore them would only end up drawing more attention to their absence. For one thing, while it's fairly easy to make an '80s show that ignores, say, the Iran-Contra Affair, the '00s were marked by unfortunate events that are somewhat harder to get around, like 9/11, the effects of mass shootings on school life, the financial crisis, the emergence of Nu Metal music, etc. And so on.Īnd if the '90s are already here, that must mean we are on the cusp of '80s mania being phased out in favor of early-'00s nostalgia, which is gonna be pretty bizarre in comparison for several reasons. The '90s gave us Austin Powers ('60s) and only a year later, That '70s Show (duh), which lasted into the mid-'00s. The '80s had Back to the Future (a literal throwback to the '50s) but also Dirty Dancing and Wonder Years ('60s). In reality, it's more like a "25-to-35-year-ish cycle." It's not as simple as "people are nostalgic for whatever happened exactly 30 years earlier" - the '70s had Star Wars (a throwback to the sci-fi serials of the '40s) but also Grease and Happy Days (both set in the '50s). Much has been written and video essay'd about the so-called "30-year nostalgia cycle" theory, which claims that whatever was popular three decades ago will be popular again now, no matter how cringey and uncool it might have seemed only a few years ago. only to give way to something far weirder and self-referential. However, there's an even greater chance that our collective infatuation with the '80s really is coming to an end sometime soon.
#90S NOSTALGIA FULL#
Note that we say "naively" with the full awareness that an article from 2034 or 2050 or 3459 might quote us and call us fools for assuming that 1980s mania would ever end. "Has ('80s nostalgia) finally run its course?" naively asked a The Guardian article from January 2010, and here we are 12 years later, binging the latest season of a " Goonies meets It" show while sincerely hyped about a new Tom Cruise movie.
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