Someday in our dotage we will tell stories of that legendary era known as “Peak T.V.” We’ll do it the way ex-hippies talk now about Woodstock: “It was wild, man, there were legends on every streamer. A thousand flowers bloomed. The lady from Fleabag ended up in Indiana Jones! You couldn’t go on Twitter until you knew whether Logan Roy had died that week.”
“What’s Twitter,” our grandkids will reply, looking at us with indulgent condescension through the holo-lens they’ve grafted onto our retinas. Which will have an effect on us not unlike that produced by asking an aging vet, “what happened in ’Nam?”
But no maundering geriatric retrospective on this fleeting micro-era would be complete without reference to the rise of the anti-hero: the Walter Whites and Tony Sopranos, the Dexters and the Don Drapers. Those apex predators whose charisma made us hate ourselves for loving them, whose raw violence and cunning mingled queasily with their charm. For a brief moment, we couldn’t look away.
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