I understand wanting to live in a time before a global pandemic (we all do!), but I don’t want to go back to a time before widespread awareness of movements like Black Lives Matter, before our recent reckoning with hate crimes and prejudices against AAPI communities, and before the #MeToo movement unveiled harassment and abuse. And as we have all spent the last year looking at screens for the majority of our days, watching shows where cell phones don’t exist was like stepping into another, simpler world.īut I fear that longing for the early aughts ignores all the social and political change that we’ve gone through. Seeing characters go to bars and diners and underground parties packed with sweaty people was about as close as I could get to the real thing. Sex and the City and The Sopranos is a refreshing change of pace from the highly stylized, glossy shows that have become the norm of contemporary television. I will admit, it’s tempting to get lost in early 2000s culture. That idea that we want to return to the fun part of a time period and remove the bad parts is understandable and worrisome. “Emerging tentatively from a pandemic and an apocalyptic political period, American culture seems hungry for a return to boom-time frivolity, but without the toxic social environment that underlaid it.” Kornhaber goes further to describe how our current situation has sparked the desire to look back: Anne Helen Petersen recently wrote about the rampant fatphobia of the ‘90s and early 2000s, and Spencer Kornhaber wrote about how we are grappling with the realization that a lot of the songs and styles we loved “ are now said to be the products of exploitation ”. This isn’t to say we’ve covered the entire era in rose-colored Ray-Bans. Between the Friends reunion, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Ai r reunion, the iCarly reboot, the resurgence of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and the many, many Tik Toks, we’re seeing more early 2000’s content than we have since…well you know when. Culturally - we can’t get enough of the early aughts. Much like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the 2000’s are coming back stronger and more powerful than ever.
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