2002 was the first time I became significantly aware of 1980s nostalgia. In December, VH1 would air the first installment of its popular I Love the ‘80s series featuring celebrity talking heads reflecting on the decade's popular culture. But it was months before that, in the spring of 2002, when I discovered that Hollywood was intent on selling “The ‘80s” as a brand. There were a multitude of shows I watched on FOX during that period (the 2001-2002 network television season). Still, I specifically remember being glued to the television each week for the riveting first season of the action series 24. During the commercial breaks, I was inundated with ads for That ‘80s Show, a (short-lived) sitcom that launched in January of that year. It wasn’t a spin-off of the popular FOX sitcom That ‘70s Show, but it was created purely based on the popularity of the ‘70s-themed sitcom. The ads heavily featured ‘80s sight gags, pop culture references, easily recognizable period clothing, and Madonna’s “Dress You Up” and The Romantics’ “What I Like About You” (appropriately, the lead single from one of the first albums released in 1980) in the ads.
The most important thing about That ‘80s Show is that it was Glenn Howerton’s first lead sitcom role before he landed It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia three years later. Aside from that, the show wasn’t very funny, and since despite its name it had no connection to the FOX sitcom that people cared about, it vanished as quickly as it arrived after one thirteen-episode season. This was 13 years after the ‘80s ended. We’re now 15 years post-2009 and we’re actually behind schedule on 2000s nostalgia. 2000s nostalgia is so hard to pin down because executives marketing “decades” to audiences want to hit the broadest audience possible. It’s why we still have films and TV shows set in decades of monoculture, where we mostly share the same cultural references as consumers. If a film is set in the ‘80s or ‘90s, you know what you’re getting. If you set it in the 2000s, things get a little trickier!
By the time high school rolled around in the early 2000s, I had a television and VCR in my room. I no longer had to negotiate TV time with the rest of my family or rely on someone to record Buffy the Vampire Slayer for me while I was at after-school theatre rehearsal. It’s a lot harder to make something come across as specifically 2003 without referencing major cultural and political events. Even the fashion is disparate. “Scenes” popped up in the 2000s more so than r previous decades. To understand the 2000s is to understand the lunchroom scene in Mean Girls. High school was no longer just jocks and nerds and cheerleaders, there were a multitude of groups and they each had their own tables.
Millennials are hyper-aware of this because they vividly remember the subcultures they were part of. This is why when a scene from Netflix’s new 2003-set slasher film, Time Cut, dropped this past week, it was immediately ripped apart on social media. Aside from the Hilary Duff song “So Yesterday” in the first scene where lead actress Madison Bailey discovers she’s in 2003, nothing in the scene actually reads as 2003. Students are on their phones in an era where students barely had cell phones in the first place and teachers would confiscate them the minute they saw you with one. The fashion barely makes sense. It’s all generic and kinda 2000s and absent any of the aforementioned subcultures wandering the halls.
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Time Cut was knocked for being a rip-off of the Amazon film Totally Killer, a slasher movie from last year starring Kiernan Shipka that also involves traveling in time to stop a serial killer, despite Time Cut going into development first. But the thing that sticks out the most is that in Totally Killer, it’s much easier to make jokes about the ‘80s than it is about the 2000s. The film skewers the politics and culture of the ‘80s. Time Cut doesn’t really care about what was going on politically in 2003. There’s no mention of George W. Bush’s first Presidency, there’s no mention of 9/11, hell there’s not even a mention of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s first break-up, which seems like a pretty easy joke in 2024.
It goes against everything marketing execs know, but the actual way to get people to care about stories is to make them specific. Embrace subcultures. People love to read stories and find ways to relate them to their own lives, most consumers are narcissistic in that way. By making something completely broad, it will appeal to no one. A reverse thing has happened with the new series Beyond Wizards of Waverly Place. The original series, Wizards of Waverly Place, debuted on the Disney Channel in 2007 starring Selena Gomez. I was in college and def too old to care about the Disney Channel, but the network had its hooks in me from a young age and I kept watching it as an adult. It was a perfect show to watch stoned in my dorm room. In the 2000s, the leads of Disney series were actresses Gomez, Raven-Symoné, Miley Cyrus, and Hilary Duff. Their respective series were aimed at tweens and teenagers. Most of the stories involved their dating woes and general teenage issues, for instance. This allowed the show to appeal to younger kids as an aspirational series, actual tweens, and also adults who had to watch the shows with their children.
The reboot has abandoned this and is now just a kids' show. I got high and watched the pilot of Beyond Wizards of Waverly Place and you couldn’t tell me the show was made for anyone over the age of 8 years old. Disney is now a streaming platform where you can pick and choose what you want to watch, so shows are no longer marketed toward the broadest audience possible. This is a plus when it comes to queer content in a show like Agatha All Along. But when it comes to the wizard show, it’s now for millennial parents to throw on for their kids to watch. The nostalgia factor might make them pick it and the familiarity of David Henrie (and Gomez in the pilot) will keep them from turning it off.
There’s a lot to unpack in the 2000s as a decade. 24 had us rooting for conservative policies and made us all complicit in the decade’s rising. Most of our films and TV became culturally vapid as Hollywood ramped up its marketing to teenage boys. We became addicted to technology. And the fashion sucked so much that’s it camp now. But most 2000s nostalgia pieces aren’t interested in unpacking the mess. They’ll give you a pop song and an actor you remember and call it a day.
I just watched Time Cut and noticed the same. But it was all worth it for my fav line: “No spoilers, but gay marriage is legal.”