Reminiscing on the Before Times (no, not the COVID times)
Revisiting the TV zeitgeist before Trump 2016.
With an election looming, I’ve been thinking about the Before Times — I guess now you could call them the Before Before Times, since the most recent Before Times people recall is B.C.: Before COVID. But equally as fascinating to me is how culturally different we were before November 2016, prior to that fateful day Trump was elected and half the country felt existential dread about the future.
For me personally, I graduated college that year, and was cautiously optimistic about truly beginning my professional life outside of school, even if it wasn’t in my field. Literally the week before the election, I was in my former apartment with my old roommate and friends, right next to Wrigley Field when the Cubs won the World Series. One of the highlights of my life was followed by one of the most devastating, as many of those same friends sat in the same apartment when Trump was declared president-elect of the 2016 election. I will tell my descendants of the deep fear that permeated the room that night for years to come.
Outside of the political shift that was made apparent that day, the next four years would gradually see a change in the pop culture we consumed as a result of the election. The political dramas and neoliberal comedies we loved pre-2016 became slowly less entertaining to us. There were a few factors playing into why: our favorite shows became too close to the reality we were living, the Democratic party moved further right, and the target audiences ultimately moved further left to the point that the tone of such shows became intolerable. The following shows, to me, best illustrate how different the Before Times were, as they reflect a certain optimism in the status quo that many of us have since lost faith in:
Scandal
House of Cards
Broad City
Key & Peele
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Orange is the New Black
Starting with the first two, they’re the most textbook political dramas here, and are arguably the two most popular of the subgenre in the last 20 years. Scandal is my favorite TV show of all time, and I loved House of Cards before Kevin Spacey’s allegations came to light. But they are a perfect examples of the different sociopolitical lens we were looking at the world through. They both began during peak Obama years — in his second term, when the general left was feeling comfortable in our ability to influence culture. This comfort allowed us to be able to immerse ourselves in the twisty1 writing of Scandal and HoC, because reality had not yet caught up to it.
Brilliant acting, searing monologues, and juicy storytelling kept us tuned in for every episode. The shows both undermined the democracy we’d been socialized to believe in, only to foil that disruption with assertions of how democracy at its best should serve the people. The characters were flawed, but we were okay with it because we knew none of it was real. Before the 2016 election season, we could not conceive of any of these storylines being anything close to real. Our political system has never been good, but one thing it was for a long time was airtight; there was an order of operations to things, a predictability that provided the political foundation these shows could build upon.
But after Trump, that predictability was replaced with perpetual dread at what obscene headlines we’d wake up to. The election rigging, covert assassinations, rape, infidelity coverups, and conservative extremism portrayed in these shows began to mimic reality. Scandal showrunner Shonda Rhimes remarked toward the end of the show’s run that, “in a world in which all of the things that we would write on ‘Scandal’ are happening in real life, it’s very hard to write ‘Scandal’ the way we used to.” Scandal and House of Cards went out with a whimper a couple of years into the Trump era, with audiences experiencing whiplash from both the real and sensationalized aspects of both shows.
Comedy Central was certainly in a different place tonally before Trump as well. Two of the most quoted comedies of the 2010s, Broad City and Key & Peele, were products of their era in contrasting ways. Key & Peele was a sketch comedy show starring two Black men (crucially, biracial men, like Obama) doing the silliest of things. Broad City was a buddy comedy starring two white women, one Jewish, navigating their messy, twentysomething lives in New York City. I don’t think either show could premiere today.
One of the top sketches that jump to mind when thinking about Key & Peele is the “Obama anger translator” and other related skits. They saw Jordan Peele impersonating Obama, and Keegan Michael Key acting as his “anger translator” in fabricated political scenarios. Both comedians portrayed the fact as a Black man, Obama had to present an even-tempered persona to the world in order to be seen as a credible. This idea stems from the “angry Black man/woman” stereotype, which the Obamas had to transcend tenfold as leaders of the free world.
These skits worked because we were living in an era where our president was “cool” to us. Be it because he was Black, or younger than presidents historically have been, or constantly making himself meme-able, we felt Obama was part of our cultural zeitgeist. Never before did the youth connect so playfully with a president, so much so that it is only after he has left office that we can see many of his actions as president as harmful on a global level. After Trump, we lost whatever symbiotic relationship we felt with power in the White House. This has continued with Biden, despite his abysmal efforts to appeal to the youth.
What’s more, Obama’s eight years as president seemed to signal a surface-level progress that allowed Black actors and comedians to prosper in ways they didn’t previously (Kerry Washington was the first Black woman to star in a network series since the ‘60s!). Now, with streaming services saturating the market and merging with one another at the corporate level, white executives at the top have begun axing shows starring Black, female, and queer entertainers. They used us to gain popularity, and are discarding us now to appeal to more “general” (white) audiences for maximum profitability.2
At the intersection of female and queer was Broad City. Ilana was a bisexual Jewish woman, the more sleazy foil to her BFF Abbi, who was the more awkward and reserved bisexual3. The series was wildly entertaining, with depictions of recreational drug use, sloppy one-night-stands, unashamed swearing, and pegging(!!!). We rarely saw women on television engage in such debauchery — and haven’t really since the series came to a satisfying end in 2019.
But the aspect of the series that I feel marks it as a poster child for the Before Times is the personalities of its protagonists, namely Ilana. I am aware that the cloyingly liberal, nearly-appropriative AAVE embodied by Ilana was meant to be interpreted as obnoxious as a commentary on third-wave feminist white women. However, it was still intended to be endearing; we weren’t supposed to dislike Ilana because she spoke the way she did. Put simply, Ilana and Abbi were snapshots of what being a liberal white twentysomething woman was like in the 2010s, similar to Girls. (Look no further than the Hillary episode.) If you went to a PWI, you knew at least three Abbis or Ilanas.
Today though, with eroding media literacy, people are incapable of grasping satire or social commentary. Hell, even during its run, people were praising Ilana as an ideal representation of young womanhood. The target Millennial audience for the show has grown up and out of Abbi and Ilana’s immaturity. If we gave it to Gen Z liberals today, they’d take it too seriously in either direction — either believing Abbi and Ilana as archetypes to stan or as indictments on how feminism is actually ruining women. The culture has become too jaded by our political landscape to receive Broad City the way it was a decade ago. The progressive hopefulness at the core of the show seems almost unrealistic now, especially with the conservatism overtaking NYC in the last few years.
The left’s relationship to the criminal justice system has evolved as well, at least for a large portion of the audiences of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Orange is the New Black. Covering opposite ends of the criminal system in nearly opposite ways, neither of these shows could work today.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine had the longest run into the Trump era, ending in 2021, buoyed by fans’ love of the characters, actors, and excellent comedy writing. As with every other show discussed here, the series marketed itself to irreverent liberal audiences, and made some honest attempts at reconciling the subject matter of policing with real-life police brutality unfolding during its run. The casting was also very Obama-era, placing two Black men in positions of power within the police force, one even being gay.4 The people who loved — still love, for nostalgia’s sake — B99 and stayed along for the ride would probably look the other way if a cop sitcom were to premiere today. We’ve seen too much abuse of power for us to suspend our disbelief. At the end of the day, copaganda is copaganda.
Orange is the New Black is a unique case in the Before Times, because the writers actually nuked the show before Trump took office. A series that superficially aimed to complicate our perception of incarcerated women, it was praised for its majority BIPOC cast and depictions of queer sex and romance. The writing of each woman’s backstory was excellent as well; for how sharply it declined, it still gave us some of the best writing for female characters to ever hit TV. It featured one of the first trans characters and actresses to be embraced as a good person. When it was good, it was really good.
So when the writers decided to grotesquely kill beloved character Poussey at the end of season four, it pissed people off so badly that they stopped watching in droves — and not just the leftist fans either. My parents watched the show, too, and even they stopped watching not long after her murder. I bet you reading this couldn’t tell me how the series ended. I will admit I tried to get into season five, but I gave up one or two episodes in. The show became too dark and the writing too illogical to feel the magic of it anymore. Season five debuted in 2017, and with social unrest about police violence heightened, our desire to see anything related to the prison system onscreen depleted.
Poussey’s death was a clear ripped-from-the-headlines attempt at commentary on the death of Sandra Bland, which happened in July 2015.5 I’m sure the showrunner Jenji Kohan and her team thought they were doing something noble in invoking reality, but instead it epitomized the Bury Your Gays and Black trauma media tropes. OITNB was subversive during its peak, and also it couldn’t work today. Conservatives would call for its cancellation, while the liberal audience it actually aimed to speak to/for have been burned too hard by police killings to have any interest in the trauma porn of it all.
The Before Times were marked by two modes: optimistic, playful progressivism or serious sociopolitical commentary. Both modes seeking to reveal something about our systems: sometimes absurdity, sometimes injustice, often unrealistic idealism. We’re staring down the fruitlessness of the status quo now. It’s okay for us to love any of the aforementioned shows; I know I still do. It’s also okay that, as with any art, they are products of the environments they were conceived in. Often, that is how the most authentic art is created, by auteurs being unabashedly present with who they are at any given moment in time. After all, that was us, then.
Real #TGIT fans know the vibes!!!
This strategy almost never works in the long run, but they always need to learn the hard way!
Abbi didn’t realize her bisexuality until the final season, and did spend most of the series dating men.
Ever since the inception of Black Lives Matter, I’ve noticed a large uptick in the amount of Black cops on TV. Really, watch TV and actually stop to notice how often a cop appears and they happen to be Black. You won’t be able to unsee it. To me, this indicates a desire to complicate the negative identity of “cop” to mainstream audiences.
The traffic stop occurred on July 10, 2015 and she died on July 13, making tomorrow the 9-year anniversary. Eerie.