AA lot has been said about TV in 2004. That it was the best year of television of all time, the peak of the Golden Age of television. Or maybe that it was the year reality television became too much, suddenly showing up on every channel as we flipped the switch.
But as famed Hollywood producer and UFO enthusiast Bryce Zabel wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2004, it was the end of television as we knew it. He chalked it up to the prevalence of TiVo and DVR in American households and predicted an upheaval so severe the whole advertising business would crumble — and he didn’t even know about streaming yet. The shift was one that a lot of people felt in real time.
For many, it was through the show Lost, which debuted in 2004 and created a fervor among obsessives trying to understand the show’s central mysteries. For me, it was a smaller but equally influential show: Veronica Mars.In true early aughts fashion, for me, it was an AIM away message that started it all: “BRB Watching Veronica Mars.
” It was the days before one could text or doomscroll while watching TV, and setting a solid away message while you stepped away from the family computer to watch a show was key. Earlier that day, in school, my friends and I had been discussing the previous episode in anticipation like we did every week, dissecting the storylines and proposing our own theories of who-done-it (no spoilers here — if you haven’t seen it, watch it!). I came back to the computer during one of the c.
