The original post: /r/television by /u/Ok-Following6886 on 2025-09-11 03:49:50+00:00.
What I mean by that is that the television landscape of the 2020s is too fragmentary for there to be any sort of “real monoculture” for there to be a way to have a unifying experience.
Compare this to the 80s where the last episode of M*A*S*H was the most-watched television episode of all time or how about the 90s where shows like Seinfeld were so popular where the finale of Seinfeld was literally watched on Times Square. See what I mean?
Even comparing now to 10 years ago is a different beast where the most watched shows of 2015 were shows that had a significant cultural impact like The Big Bang Theory, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and so on. Say what you want about these shows but at least people talked about them in a sense of unity.
But this started to change with the advent of streaming where during the latter half of the 2010s (while streaming shows were becoming popular like with Orange is the New Black or House of Cards during the first half, cable shows were still more popular), streaming shows started to eclipse cable or network shows in popularity with things like Stranger Things, 13 Reasons Why, A Handmaid’s Tale, and so on and this really started to become more apparent during the 2020s as the pandemic made streaming more popular than ever. You started to have television culture more fragmented as people weren’t watching the same shows on cable anymore on the same channels as people can watch whatever they want on streaming.
This has become a problem where if you get a group of 10 people and tell them what their favorite current-running shows are, they have wildly different answers whereas people in the past had more unity and can relate to each other’s experiences.
As a result, this led to the most watched show of 2025 being a Disney Junior toddler’s show since kids are the closest to having a sort of monoculture and even that is fragmented due to them spending time on algorithm-driven sites like YouTube or TikTok and whatnot.
This is a problem since if that is the most watched show of the decade, this is a problem because it shows that monoculture is dead, there isn’t a unifying show of the decade where people can understand what you are talking about if you told it to a stranger. I wish that monoculture could rise up again or else this problem will get worse.