Page 44 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

the Big Bite
osition. Or it could have been in 2016, the calendar
year in which David Bowie, Prince, American de-
mocracy, and George Michael all died.
The culture evolved because the role of gatekeeper
changed hands. In 2010, we still depended on linear
television networks and radio and traditional media
to tell us what was worth consuming. But as the de-
cade went on, as the streaming services expanded our
options beyond our ability to choose, we became one
another’s tastemakers via social media. Your Marvels
and DCs and Disneys still had their teams of executives
to protect and promote their bajillion-dollar proper-
ties, but we found ourselves sharing the smaller stuff.
And because Twitter doesn’t reflexively cater to the
straight white guy, the entertainment we hyped didn’t,
either. Women, queer people, and people of color cen-
tered themselves in their own stories, and those sto-
ries resonated in new ways. Thus did Two and a Half
Men give way to Atlanta and Mad Men to The Hand-
maid’s Tale. La La Land literally handed over its Best
Picture Oscar to Moonlight.
It was the decade of the massive, empty blockbuster
and the enduring, significant cult hit. The teens are
bookended by the two biggest movies of all time, as
2019’s Avengers: Endgame overtook 2009’s Avatar as
the top-grossing film in history. I’ve spent ten minutes
trying to think of a second thing about Avatar, and
all I’ve come up with is “I think some of them were
blue?” Meanwhile, everyone remembers how that
one lady mispronounced “Mailchimp” in season 1
of Serial. Game of Thrones’ $15 million finale ended
with a whimper, and all we wanted to talk about was
the Hot Priest’s goodbye on Fleabag. Taylor Swift
released six number-one albums with the precision
of military campaigns, but the song of the decade—
Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” from 2010—never
hit the Hot 100.
If there’s no one trend that defines the decade, it’s
because there was simply so much stuff. It’s difficult
FACES OF THE DECADE
From left: Jennifer Lawrence
as The Hunger Games’
Katniss Everdeen, Jon Hamm
as Mad Men’s Don
Draper, and Lil Nas X.
38 Winter 2020_Esquire
was not oppressed by content. Someone would recom-
mend a new television show to you, and your response
would not be a weary, anxious sigh and a promise to
put it at the end of an unmanageably long to-watch list.
As our television options grew, so did our TV time
allowance. The binge watch is a by-product of the
streaming age, but it took root at the beginning of
the end of linear television. We’d hear how badly we
needed to watch the critically acclaimed but low-
rated Friday Night Lights or Breaking Bad, but we
never got around to it until Netflix let us watch
episode after episode with no DVR programming
issues to intrude. Streaming allowed shows to roll
out the way they had in the UK for decades—a hand-
If the role of gate- ful of episodes whenever the creators felt like rolling
keeper began to them out—and the network model of 22 episodes
pass from a guy in a per year immediately felt obsolete. We cut the cord,
suit to the rest and now we subscribe to so many streaming services
of us in our pajamas, that our old cable bills feel surprisingly affordable.
the world is The stars who blew up in the teens didn’t seem in-
a better, funnier terested in playing it the way their elders did. Jennifer
place for it. Lawrence made her movie debut in Winter’s Bone,
broke out in the dystopian Hunger Games and the Phil-
adelphian Silver Linings Playbook, and made stops in
mop drama Joy and psychedelic-but-in-the-bad-way
mother! There were two Armie Hammers in The So-
cial Network, and though he gave the action-hero life
a try in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., by the end of the
decade he’d settled into well-chosen indies Call Me
by Your Name and Sorry to Bother You. Jordan Peele
got attention on Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, then
spent it behind the scenes on the decade’s best horror
movies, Get Out and Us. Kendrick Lamar introduced
himself with a track about alcoholism and ended the
decade with a Pulitzer Prize.
The pop charts, solid and predictable only a few years
ago, threw themselves into chaos. Billboard made a
change to its singles-chart methodology in 2012 to
reflect how young people consume music, so Internet
trends begat massive and instantly forgotten hits like
“Gangnam Style” and “Harlem Shake.” Lizzo finally
The #MeToo movement forced Louis C.K. into the
If you can’t handle that, all is not lost. Surely