The End: How A Decade of Iconic Television Ended In One Spectacular Season

The funny thing about dividing cultural touchstones into 10-year groups is that sometimes culture doesn’t divide neatly.

Take music, for example. Let It Be and Bridge Over Troubled Water are quintessentially 1960s-sounding albums that were both released in 1970. The 70s were the decade of groovy disco and funk, but Funkytown by Lipps Inc., didn’t top the charts until 1980. Few songs reek of 80s hair metal like Cherry Pie by Warrant, but that song wasn’t released until 1990. 

You get my point. Eras don’t die just because the calendar switches to a new decade. And, just as importantly, eras don’t start at the turn of a decade either. Just think about the decade of television we just had.

At the end of the 2009-10 TV season, the highest rated shows on television included American Idol, Lost, House, Two And A Half Men and Desperate Housewives. The most nominated show at the Emmys that year was Glee. Bret Michaels outlasted Holly Robinson Peete to win The Celebrity Apprentice. Whatever you’ve come to define as TV in the 2010s, it sure as hell hadn’t quite started by 2010.

So what do we define as the major tenets of television in the 2010s? The emergence of streaming platforms as viable alternatives to network or cable is probably the biggest one. But there’s also the migration of high-profile movie actors, writers and directors to television. There’s the reboot fever on network that revived everything from Charlie’s Angels and Hawaii Five-O to The Odd Couple and One Day At a Time. And broadly, there’s the move from conventional and procedural TV storytelling to higher concept and deeply serialized stories. 

Let’s take a look at when the shows that define this era began. The Walking Dead premiered in late 2010. Game of Thrones premiered in early 2011. Homeland premiered a few months after Thrones. American Horror Story started doing whatever the heck it does in 2011 as well. House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black didn’t kick off the streaming revolution until 2013. And it wasn’t until 2015 when both Breaking Bad and Mad Men were off the air, taking half the decade for the most powerful vestiges of the previous era to run their courses.

But of course, I don’t write about high drama. I write about sitcoms. So when did the 2010s begin in the sitcom world? The earliest answer could be in summer 2010 when Louie premiered, debuting the auteur-era of sitcoms that would later be copied, replicated or improved on with the likes of Master of None, Atlanta and Fleabag, among others. A safer answer might be 2012, especially at HBO where Veep and Girls premiered within SEVEN DAYS of one another in April of that year. 

Still, the sitcoms that I think will end up culturally defining the 2010s really started turning up around 2014. Everything from Transparent and You’re the Worst to Broad City and black-ish premiered that year. Netflix’s comedy boom came right after that, with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Master of None debuting in 2015 and Love coming shortly after in 2016. 

Since I refuse to count Orange Is The New Black as a comedy (because it’s not one), it’s possible to say that the decade that’ll be defined as the binge-watching age didn’t have its first true binge-watch comedies until 2014 and 2015. 

That’s an awfully late start for a decade that is absolutely loaded with memorable sitcom episodes and moments. Sure, plenty of those were holdover moments and episodes from the aughts era of Peak TV. But for the most part, a staggering percentage of the decade’s best moments, seasons, episodes and series are densely packed into the back half of the era.

Another major tenet of the television evolution in the 2010s was a willingness on the parts of networks and creators to end series early. With binge-watching up and attention spans thirstier than ever for compelling storytelling, shows are tighter and shorter than they’ve ever been. Which is why for as late as this era of sitcoms seemed to start, I think it also ended already.

The spring of 2019 was an absolute graveyard for the best sitcoms of the decade. On Jan. 25, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s final season was released. Crashing (U.S.) came to an end on March 10. Catastrophe’s fourth and final season dropped on Amazon on March 15. Broad City ended on March 28. You’re the Worst ended on April 3. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend ended two flipping days later on April 5. Speechless faced its inevitable cancellation head on with a would-be finale on April 12. Veep kept the ball rolling by ending one month later on May 12. A few days after that on May 16, The Big Bang Theory aired its finale. One day later, the second and final season of Fleabag dropped in the U.S. on May 17. 

That’s 10 shows that I love, all ending within four months of one another. And in almost every case, I knew the end was coming. Especially with You’re the Worst, Broady City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, every week was a panic-attack-inducing cry fest as I had to devote three nights a week to shows making highly publicized endings. Heck, the promotions for both Broad City and You’re The Worst centered around hammering the phrase “final season” into commercials as frequently as possible. 

I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the last time something like this happened in May 2004, when Friends and Frasier both said goodbye within one week of one another. Anyone who knows me knows I was an obsessive Friends fan in high school and college, and still count it as one of my favorite shows to this day. And Frasier is my favorite show to watch random episodes of before bed. They’re two of the best four-cam sitcoms ever made, and I probably didn’t even need to qualify that with four-cam. They’re just great shows.

But I think the stretch we had in the spring of 2019, especially the eight-day span that included the endings of You’re the Worst, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Broad City, hit harder than even Friends and Frasier’s finales would’ve. Because television is so much more serialized now. And as painful as it still is to see Rachel get on the plane or to see Frasier, uh, get on the plane (never realized that before), neither of those finales ever led to me sitting in the dark for 10 minutes sobbing uncontrollably while listening to The Mountain Goats. 

I don’t want to sound overdramatic, but it honestly felt like I lost a part of myself losing that much great television in the span of weeks. Most of the shows ended happily. But saying goodbye to Rebecca Bunch and Abbi and Ilana and Selina Meyer and Kimmy and Tituss and especially Jimmy and Gretchen felt like the last party I had with my high school friends before we left for college. And even if I had long ago given up on The Big Bang Theory, saying goodbye to Sheldon and Leonard and Penny and the gang kind of felt that way too. 

It’s the feeling where you’ve built up a support system of people you want in your life, and then suddenly all of them are gone and all you’re left with is the lessons you learned along the way. I often say that a sitcom becomes great not when it’s at its funniest, but when the characters on the show become people you want to welcome into your home every week. Streaming complicates that relationship, of course. But I think that still holds, even with shows we only binge once a year. 

The beauty of television is that you give yourself years, sometimes a decade, to get to know a character’s life story. Unfortunately for me, dozens of those life stories ended in a short span earlier this year. In my book, that’s the end of an era. But that might be a little single-minded. Shows like The Good Place, Barry, GLOW and The Marvelous Ms. Maisel will surely carry this decade into the next one.

Still, it’s hard not to appreciate the finality of a decade actually ended in its own decade. Even if it meant a couple months of internal torment.