The 2010s

[Sarah 103]

On Sunday, May 7th, is the start of the CNN mini-series on the 2010s. I think it's too soon for them to be doing this and that they should have waited another 10 years. There are 7 episodes. The first episode is on TV and the second episode is on music. I am guessing based on pure speculation there will be an episode on social media/technology, an episode on politics, an episode on race, and possibily one on movies. 

 

[Sarah 103]

The last five minutes were spent on pandemic TV in the US, which is a different decade than what this miniseries is supposed to be covering. That bothered me. 

I can't believe they made the same mistake in this episode that they made in the TV episode of the 2000s mini-series. I was hoping they could use this as a bit of a second chance, but nope. They covered the critics' darlings and what generated buzz on the internet, but they barely mentioned the shows people were actually watching. For most of the decade, the top rated comedy was The Bang Theory and the top rated drama was NCIS and those weren't even mentioned. There's a massive split between what people were actually watching in large numbers and what the critics' darlings/what generated buzz on the internet. This is an important story/part of TV in the decade they were covering, and they just completely missed it. 

[MadyGirl1987]

5 hours ago, Sarah 103 said:

The last five minutes were spent on pandemic TV in the US, which is a different decade than what this miniseries is supposed to be covering. That bothered me. 

I can't believe they made the same mistake in this episode that they made in the TV episode of the 2000s mini-series. I was hoping they could use this as a bit of a second chance, but nope. They covered the critics' darlings and what generated buzz on the internet, but they barely mentioned the shows people were actually watching. For most of the decade, the top rated comedy was The Bang Theory and the top rated drama was NCIS and those weren't even mentioned. There's a massive split between what people were actually watching in large numbers and what the critics' darlings/what generated buzz on the internet. This is an important story/part of TV in the decade they were covering, and they just completely missed it. 

I wondered why they were covering the pandemic as well. During the opening credits, they show a graphic that looks like a red wave sweeping part of the globe and then a covid virus(like this but red 🦠). I was thinking why would they be talking about the pandemic? Could it be something else? But nope, I guess this is going to be the 2010’s and early 2020’s…

And yeah, they definitely had a chance to address the discrepancy between ratings and what creates buzz. I also thought they could have gone into some of the negatives of the current streaming environment, such as how shows don’t get a chance to start slow and grow. Shows are canceled much more quicker now, and are not given to grow their audiences or be found in the glut of options out there. Also; doing one season all at once prevents changes to storylines that aren’t resonating with audiences, giving writers a chance to pivot midseason if need be. 

[anna0852]

I’m not ready for a covid episode 

[Annber03]

I got a kick out of the fact that some of the shows they covered in this first episode were ones they'd covered in the one on the 2000s. 

37 minutes ago, anna0852 said:

I’m not ready for a covid episode 

I'm not ready for the episode covering the political landscape of this past decade. May have to skip that one, 'cause there's so much there I would REALLY rather not relive. 

[CAM]

Yeah I agree with above who said that it is way to soon for this...and Covid we just lived through it; why even go there in this series.

I feel that if it happened in 2020 it needs to be left out.

I think TV in the 2010s was full of shows that were either:

-Renewed to many times because they were "popular", which lead to story lines becoming subpar the longer they stayed on air.

-Shows that were canceled after one season, because they weren't "popular" but they probably would have been if given the chance.

-Shows that had a few seasons, but would have been better had they been limited series. 

Edited May 9, 2023 by CAM
Spelling

[Sarah 103]

22 hours ago, MadyGirl1987 said:

I also thought they could have gone into some of the negatives of the current streaming environment, such as how shows don’t get a chance to start slow and grow. Shows are canceled much more quicker now, and are not given to grow their audiences or be found in the glut of options out there. Also; doing one season all at once prevents changes to storylines that aren’t resonating with audiences, giving writers a chance to pivot midseason if need be. 

I agree with this. Another negative is that people were no longer watching the same shows or even had access to the same shows, and it became almost impossible to be familiar with or even aware of every series that came out. We lost a shared form of pop cultural entertainment. 

[Twilight Man]

On 5/5/2023 at 2:24 PM, Sarah 103 said:

I think it's too soon for them to be doing this and that they should have waited another 10 years.

Tell that to the people who worked at MTV fifteen years ago.   They started doing an "I Love The New Millennium"

before the decade actually ended.   It came out in the year 2008, and only covered the first eight

(2000 counts as Year 1, 2001 as Year Two)  years.

I wasn't exactly holding my breath on if MTV was going to have an "I Love The 2010s" anytime soon

(and the latest news (about MTV News) just cements my belief that MTV is slowly dying),

so we will just have to watch CNN and their specials instead.

[Sarah 103]

On 5/12/2023 at 12:01 AM, Twilight Man said:

Tell that to the people who worked at MTV fifteen years ago.   They started doing an "I Love The New Millennium"

before the decade actually ended. 

I hold CNN to a higher standard for documentaries than MTV and VH1. (That being said, I spent far more hours watching E True Hollywood Story, and Vh1's Behind the Music, and the I Love The (insert decades here) as a middle school/high school student than I probably should have).

[secnarf]

I was interested to watch this episode, because I do not really listen to current music anymore at all, but in the first half of the 2010s I did still get exposed to popular music pretty regularly. I was curious what they would focus on.

So much of the music episode I watched thinking "I just cannot relate".

Beyonce's Lemonade album was a world-stopping event comparable to the moon landing? Are you kidding me? What world is this?

Occasionally they would play a bit of a song that took me back to a specific time/place in my life, and that was interesting, but there was just so much that I absolutely couldn't relate to at all, and a lot I didn't recall ever hearing. I don't even have Spotify so I couldn't relate to that part either. Mind you, I don't think I would know who Billie Eilish is if she wasn't a semi-frequent answer on Jeopardy.

It was interesting to watch, but I felt really detached from it.

[Sarah 103]

The episode on Obama and his legacy was kind of a mess. They were trying to cover far too much in 40 minutes. This should have been three different episodes. Race, Racism, and White Nationalism should have been its own seperate episode. The 2016 election should have been its own episode. 

[Sarah 103]

I was dissapointed with the Trump episode. I don't think it really captured who he was as a person or what his presidency and administration was like. Also, I still say the 2016 election should have been its own episode. There's still 3 episodes left, so my opinion could change, but so far I've been dissapointed with this mini-series. 

Here is what I think the episodes topics should have been and what order they should have aired them. 

1. TV (because they always start with it)

2. Music (because that's usually the second episode)

3. Social media

4. Protests, Race, Racism (and other forms of hatred), and White Nationalism

5. Obama's Second Term

6. The 2016 Election

7. The Trump Administration/Presidency.

This way each episode can build on what came before and there is a bit of an arc to it. I wish this series had been more like the Movies one (when watched in chronological order, not airdate order). You can watch an individual episode without having seen the others, but if you watch all of the episodes in the proper order it tells an over-arching story, and some of the earlier episodes provide context for later episodes. 

[Sarah 103]

I wish the episode on protests and social movements had spent a bit more time on the subject of White Nationalism and been clearer about the explicit links between Donald Trump and White Nationalism.

Each episode is trying to cover too much, and is part of one of my biggest problem is with this series and why overall I think it's the weakest one so far. For The Movies they were able to show how movies or the industry changed over the course of the decade that was the topic of the episode. In all of the previous decade series, within each episode they did a fantastic job of explaining the state of Topic X at the start of the decade and what it was at the end of the decade.  They were able to show how something changed over the course of a decade. For event based episodes like the Kennedy Assasination or Watergate, they did an equally fantastic job of explaining what the event was, why it mattered, and how it changed things. This miniseries isn't really doing that, which is part of the reason it suffers by comparison. 

[Sarah 103]

I thought the episode on social media was one of the best of this mini-series. It had a clear arc and I thought it did an excellent job charting how social media changed and evolved over the decade. 

My only super minor complaint/quibble is that I wish they spent a minute or two explaining that the massive increase in smart phones occured at this time, because that was the decade that smartphone ownership really accelerated. 

Edited June 21, 2023 by Sarah 103

[Sarah 103]

The final episode of the miniseries is on 2020 and the pandemic, which doesn't make sense. It's the start of a different decade and a completely different event.

I really wish they had done an episode on the 2016 election or an episode on White Nationalism/White Supremacists. I have no problem with them covering the 2021 insurection as part of this mini-series (and in fact wished they had gone a little bit more in depth on it) because the 2021 insurection was very much related to and in many ways the culmination of trends and events that occured within the 2010s, which is what the topic of this mini-series was supposed to be. 

Hopefully, the next CNN mini-series See It Loud will be better. 

[blueray]

I enjoyed this series for the most part. As always the TV one is my favorite. Though I think they should have put in movies as well. The rise of the MCU would have been worth discussing, as it lasted the whole decade.

As for the last episode, it seemed like they were going at it as lets cover the year 2020. Which is such a complex year, that it did need it's own episode. And the way they are doing it, it would fall in the past decade (not this one). However at the end there they went into 2021. I was watching this with my husband, we came to the conclusion that they had to do this (despite being this decade). If they didn't, they couldn't talk about the election results, Jan 6 and arresting the cop (that killed George Floyd). And they would have to wait 7+ years to cover it.

I loved how they covered the TV shows slightly in this one as well, as I remember Stephen Cobert in the bathtub as it was a product of it's time. And of course ending it with John Oliver's FU 2020 clip made me smile :).

Edited July 3, 2023 by blueray

[secnarf]

Finally finished the series.

My overarching comment is the same as it was at the beginning - it is way too soon to do the 2010s. For earlier decades, they could explain the context of events in history and how they mattered today. Now, not only are you trying to explain this to an audience that very recently lived through all of these events, but you don't really have the perspective of how it fits into history because it *isn't* yet history, really.

IMO, the episode on 2020 merely indicates that they know they cannot do a 2020s series (at least, not for another seven years) and didn't have the self-restraint to pass up the opportunity to discuss all of those events from 2020. They even ventured into January 2021.

For me, it also puts the previous decades series in a bit of a different light, as it is a lot easier to be aware of the biases of the showrunners when I have such clear memories of the events being discussed, and don't always agree with their viewpoint. The most obvious examples, for me, come from the music episode and how much of that episode I just couldn't relate to at all.