The Case Of The Missing Decades

One aspect I've felt in the past however-many years is how similar everything has seemed for so long. A movie like Back to the Future is built on the premise that the 1950s would feel as alien a world to someone from the 1980s as the far-flung future of 2015; in contrast, recent eras haven't popped as easily for me. While I can easily conjure visions of what (say) the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and even '90s felt like, I've had a really hard time mentally differentiating between (say) 2025, 2015, and 2005.

We accidentally found one anecdote to this in our household by starting a dinner-time viewing of Monk. This mystery series stars Tony Shalhoub as the titular Mr. Monk, a neurotically-phobic-yet-brilliant freelance detective. Most interestingly to me, the series ran from 2002 to 2009 – placing it firmly in my mental "Bermuda Triangle" of disappeared decades.

Yeah, it's something of a blast from the past to remember what the world was like just a couple of decades ago. Everyone's wearing flag pins (because of 9/11). Mysteries have featured VCRs, 3.5" floppy disks, and mechanical cameras. The Internet is solidly dial-up and incidental to daily life. Several plot points have revolved around characters not being able to reach one another because, what, you think everyone's going to just lug around a telephone with them all the time or something?!

Oh, and – as a warning – I guess the show also raises modern eyebrows by being a couple decades behind in terms of today's mindsets regarding mental considerations and accommodations. Still, it's funny seeing everyone treat Mr. Monk as if he's the unreasonable one for being weirded out by being sneezed on; in a post-COVID world, I find myself going, "I do not think he's being paranoid enough . . ."

-- Steven Marsh