In a year that saw many of us relegated to our homes for much of its duration, TV was an ever more powerful medium for connecting. There was no watercooler to gather around-well, there was, but the office had to be abandoned-yet each new premiere became a communal experience.
Trying to define television in the 2010s has proven just as great a task as keeping up with the surge in series, which crested in 2018 with 495 scripted shows. The plethora of options-not just in series, but platforms, including upstarts turned streaming elders Netflix and Hulu-makes it nearly impossible to neatly summarize the mood or even mode of this era of TV.
There was a dramatic energy shift that took place just over seven minutes into the 2015 Super Bowl Halftime show. The aerial shot of Katy Perry’s candy-coated, beachy set for “California Girls” quickly cut to a dark, smoky silhouette.