Killing time

Annie Lord

It’s difficult to tell in which period I Am Not Okay with This exists. The Netflix comedy, about a teenage girl struggling with grief and queerness, is set in a small Pennsylvania town with dusty signs for Fiddles Diner and Booky’s Hardware, yet to undergo the globalisation of the 1990s that stuck a Starbucks on every American street corner. Even superpowered protagonist Syd’s chunky knits, striped T-shirts and Levi’s jeans are typical of a 1970s student.

The era mish-mashing continues when Stan asks Syd to come over and listen to a cult band called Bloodwitch, whose intoxicated groaning recalls louche 1970s bands like The Velvet Underground. Is it set further in the future than we thought? When Syd’s mum gets annoyed at her for shrinking her skin-coloured tights in the wash, Syd yells back, “No one’s worn those since the 1990s.” And after a school counsellor asks Syd to record her feelings in a diary, Syd asks why she can’t just write on her phone.

Genre has long been dead in popular culture. In music, hip-hop sounds more like emo nowadays, while the language barrier has become increasingly irrelevant as mainstream artists cherry-pick from Latin pop and have a go at singing in Spanish. Western movies have all jump scares and prolonged torture scenes of horror films. The Internet allows us all to pick ’n’ mix inspiration from far-flung places that would otherwise remain buried beneath subculture initiation ceremonies. But now our concept of time is disintegrating, too — and none more so than on the small screen.

We can see this scrapbooking of earlier eras in a number of recent TV shows. The roadside cafes serving banana split, the Elvis soundtrack and the floral tea dresses all suggest that Channel 4’s dark comedy The End of the F***ing World was set in the 1950s. But this theory is thrown off when one of the characters, Alyssa, smashes up an iPhone in the school canteen. Netflix’s Sex Education feels like the 1980s, with its varsity jackets and mustard yellow soft furnishings, until all characters start talking about consent with the sort of sensitivity you didn’t get in John Hughes films.

Over in teen thriller Riverdale, the nurses aren’t in blue scrubs but candy striper dresses, characters have their hair set in World War II era hot irons and everyone drives old cars — pastel-coloured Cadillacs, Volkswagen Beetles or Dodge Dart Swingers. But again, like I Am Not Okay with This, the feeling of being stuck in the past is erased as soon as one of the characters opens a MacBook.

Tellingly, a lot of these era mish-mashes appear to be shows made for Gen-Z characters, who are not bothered if these shows look old-fashioned because everything they wear is old-fashioned anyway. But there’s also a sense that these shows use the glow of nostalgia as a shield to confront current issues. As Laurie Nunn, Sex Education’s creator, explained, “We wanted the show to have show nostalgic backdrop, as well as talk about contemporary, modern themes and have storylines for the characters.”

The present is so bad, it seems, that the only way to push the conversation forward – on topics like consent, mental health and so on — is to blur the past together to create surreality.

— The Independent

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