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What are some examples of media that really captured lightning in a bottle?
I've been feeling nostalgic and watching some old Top Gear recently. It has got me thinking about how remarkable the chemistry between the three hosts is and how the combination of those three, the time that top gear ran, and the format they chose created such an incredibly successful and wide-reaching show. Despite many efforts no one has been able to make a car show to rival it.
What are some other examples of this sort of phenomena? Where the right time, place, people and format come together to create something extraordinary? Doesn't have to be television necessarily, but given the example that spurred this question I figured this wasn't a bad place to post.
Stranger Things season 1. They got the exact right time for 80s nostalgia. The quality fell off over the seasons and still waiting for the final one but it really should have stopped at season 1. Or been an anthology with new stories every season.
Man, the shows that were supposed to be/even should have been anthologies like Heroes, etc. but then took off in popularity & got hamstrung by keeping their talent—is it just shows with kids who get too old to play younger roles during production? That part at least definitely didn't help GoT, and I still remember Walt from LOST being like 25 at the end lol.
True Detective is the only winner I can think of that was intended to be an anthology, got hugely popular, and remained true to its anthology-ness—and man talk about lightning in a bottle, but also the subsequent seasons have not managed to recapture the lightning, because that's the whole nature of lightning I guess.
Gotta be honest - season 3 of True Detective is the best season. Season 1, as amazing as it is, is slightly overhyped because of its cast. The visuals representing the lead’s dementia and the writing of the ending are both 10/10. It’s so beautiful and bittersweet and genuinely sad all at the same time.
for real? I lost the plot somewhere during the vince vaughn season, I'll have to check it out! But man that is a big claim lol, Rustin Cole is somehow the actual badass loser that every loser badass from high school thought they were and Woody is just perfect at being an agry white dad—that last ep with the yellow king pursuit through the horrifying LA swamp, damn. Might have to watch S1 again first
I don’t think you can talk about it without mentioning Game of Thrones. The only reason the last season could be so culturally devastating was because it was so beloved. I also think it’s funny how the entire world just kinda forgot it existed a few weeks after we recovered from the awful last season.
Game of Thrones is such a shame. Everyone, including HBO, wanted it to be longer to finish it off but the writers refused, wanting to move onto other projects. Should have passed it off to someone else.
Yeah.. I think D&D were great at adapting GRRMs work for TV, but shit at creating the content themselves. They're kind of both at fault here. George R. R. Martin for not planning ahead and opening up so many storylines that he's struggling to consolidate them now, and Dan&Dave for not admitting that creating oroginal content to complete someone else's work is simply not where their expertise lies.
Until GRRM finishes the books, he's not off the hook for the ending.
We can all believe that it was supposed to be better, but it's totally possible that this is all GRRM's fault.
Oh I fully believe that the ending is functionally the same as his intended one for the novels, but it suffers from having a point that GRRM plotted to, and an ending and zero connective tissue between them. Plus D&D were done and ready to go showrun.... Confederates. A show no one asked for and ultimately no one got.
It could go either way, but yes, there definitely is a possibility the basic plot in future books ends up similar to the show.
What I imagine is, that GRRM gave them bullet points of where he intends certain characters to end up. Things like 'Arya will be the hero that kills the night king in the end when the white walkers invade the north'. Arya being set up as the hero was actually something I had conversations with people about well before the last two seasons aired, and I'm convinced there are ways to make it work, but a few pages of bullet points is simply not the same as two 700 page books.
One of the major issues I noticed early on when watching the later seasons was that pacing was suddenly off. While early on in the show they spent half a season travelling from up north to kings landing, in some late episodes you basically get there and back again within one episode. Proper setup of major eventa is just so important but unfortunately severely lacking in late stage GoT. Most of the basic story elements probably could've worked in one way or another if they hadn't simply been cramed into a few episodes.
I remember watching the first Season 8 episode and thinking - wow, that was surprisingly slow. But two episodes later the whole white walker invasion and night king battle was just.. done and over with. It just felt so anticlimatic.
But without rambling further about the issues of late GoT seasons: Yes, I can totally believe that there is a world where GRRM releases two books that cover most of the major plot points from the show's last two seasons, but manages to do it in a more satisfying way by setting up clear motivations and giving the story time to develop. (Although some changes would be very welcome. Things like killing off little finger when there were so many potential plot lines already set up were probably only done to wrap things up anyway.)
I'm just basing that on GRRM saying he'd given them the ending. I agree that bullet points are insufficient but I lay the blame of D&D for not being able to write basic character motivation, and cutting the last season short because they were done with it.
Smaller points like Littlefinger - I think he dies because too many people want to kill the shitweasel but how is probably different - are more likely to have been made up because it just gets the other characters from point a to point b.
I agree 100%. I watched through the entire series again with my parents after season 8 happened. You can see how, as soon as they start catching up with Martin's published books, they start falling apart. I think, at the time, people missed the signs of poor writing since the earlier seasons were so good. But after a rewatch, seasons 6 and 7 already show a bunch of cracks. It would have been fantastic if HBO just said that future seasons would only happen after Martin published his works. The internet would still hate that decision, but it would have made for a better show.
There were complaints in the fandom by season 5 as soon as they were off book…
Well done. I remember this is the excuse the writers gave for the Ice&Fire forces being ambushed by the royal navy. They "just kind of forgot" about them. What an inane, insulting plot turn.
The worst part for me was that it just didn't make sense. How can a large fleet of ships armed with anti air weapons hide from view of someone riding a dragon, then just sail up and get into range to shoot one down. You'd think after spotting the fleet they could just fly out of range, mobility being half the benefit of having dragons that can fly.
I was just talking about this last night with my sister:
It’s absolutely insane that in a world where “premier” TV hasn’t really kicked off yet, this one show got almost everybody I know to pay for HBO and then watch on a weekly basis and then on top of that, it was a fantasy show with swords and sorcery. It’s absolutely bonkers that so many people cared about a dense fantasy show that you had to pay money to watch (wasn’t just included in cable or whatever).
It was crazy to see how much of an influence the show had on pop culture. Everyone quoted it, merchandise was in every department store, you could even play fantasy GOT where you draft characters and get points for them killing, having sex, or dying. Despite the final season or two, it’s still one of the most important shows ever made. I can’t guess what the TV world might be like if they nailed the last season instead. Maybe since we’re 6 years removed, people would have moved on anyways, but I think if the show ended better, maybe we’d have seen a string of spin offs, movies, etc, instead of waiting 4 years for House of the Dragon.
I also feel that other shows like Wheel of Time may have gotten an indirect boost from people hungry for more GoT-likes if GoT itself didn’t leave such a sour taste in our mouths after season 8.
Lightning in a bottle, indeed. I think the TV world is so wide now, there are dozens of amazing shows on at any given time, that I might be hard for us to ever see another show where the whole world is collectively watching and talking about it.
Since you said not necessarily television:
Harry Potter. Not necessarily the movies, but the books. An entire generation grew up alongside Harry, with books being released as they turned his age. It was uniquely relatable, easily readable for a younger audience, but still captivating for adults. It got millions of kids into reading, having them experience that fantastical, cathartic escape from reality for the first time, and its success revolutionized the expectations we have for books catering towards a younger audience. I myself read them multiple times over as a kid - although I was a few years to young to be fully in sync with the release schedule.
When the last book was released the hype was absolutely insane. Bookshops opened up at midnight, the postal service around here called in a bunch of staff so that they could deliver thousands of books before 2 a.m., every corner had some Harry Potter themed event, and hardly anyone didn't get in contact with the story in some form. I myself read the entire thing in like four days despite having to go to school in between. Never experienced something like this since, despite a huge spike in books attempting to copy the recipe in the following years.
I guess it hit the sweetspot in time when kids were taken increasingly serious as a target audience, but digital media hadn't yet taken that much attention away from recreational reading.
It's a shame how Rowling derailed in the years to come, but that doesn't change the positive impact the books had back then.
Roughly around the same time period, the Lord of the Rings film trilogy made similar waves. To a (slightly) lesser degree the Star Wars prequel trilogy was also coming out around then to huge hype. The Matrix franchise was also doing gangbusters in those years. Not just the sequel films but also the Animatrix and some popular video game tie-ins.
I’d say all four of these were the cultural juggernauts of that era.
The thing that always gets me is that fucking everyone was reading Harry Potter back then. So where did all these people who are movie fans but never read the books come from???? And why would you even like those nonsense movies if you didn't have the books to make sense of them? (And, very importantly, how could you like those movies if you have read the books so you know how much better they do everything?)
I was initially pretty critical of the books when they came out because it seemed so derivative. The setting is pretty much "every fictional being and creature really exists: werewolves, vampires, ghosts,unicorns, whatever". But the characters are pretty interesting and the way that all the whole series is coherent, and she finished all of them in a reasonable time, is pretty remarkable.
It seems like the long tail of the series is the fan fiction. I wonder if any other work has as much fan fiction. I guess this is partly related to the derivative nature of the world and the sheer popularity of the books and movies.
Another interesting thing is the incessant nitpicking of the plot points and in-universe contradictions. There has been so much written about "why is quidditch stupid" or "why time turners ruin everything" or "why are wizards so stupid". It's kind of amazing.
There are many issues with the books, but my nine (±1) year old me didn't concern himself with those during the initial reading experience. Might've been different had I started reading them when I was older.
A bit later on (not much; still a kid) when I read LotR I did find it fascinating how very differently Rowling and Tolkien approached writing though. Tolkien spent years on worldbuilding and only placed the specific story into the world with all of its already fleshed-out lore in the background. With Rowling worldbuilding always felt like an afterthought, as new concepts were introduced in detail as needed along the way and often referenced in later, but never in earlier books. Instead inter-personal relationships between the characters took center stage in the Harry Potter books and felt much more deliberately planned than the world around them. Also it quickly became very clear which one was the linguist among the two. :D
In the end I think the most important appeal of Harry Potter was the relatability. Everyone could imagine themselves going to Hogwarts and experiencing the magic first hand. Minor inconsistencies were happily overlooked and explained away with magic. And let's be honest - what 11 year old at the time didn't kinda somehow hope – even if they would never admit it – that maybe, just maybe Hogwarts wasn't that fictional place after all. ^^
Looking at you, George R. R. Martin...
I think Monty Python applies here. Today it is mostly standup comedians that are doing that kinds of sketch based comedy, but the Monty Python weren't comedians, they came from an intellectual university background and I think that created a truly unique approach to what is funny. I have seen in interviews with them that were definitely not just fooling around on set or improvising much. Things were written out and planned and they barely laughed on set. Making good comedy is serious business.
The Cambridge Footlights have produced a lot of comedians, both before and after Monty Python, it's kind of a given that any well-spoken English comedian probably went to Cambridge (a.k.a. one of the two most prestigious universities in the country).
How has no one mentioned Tiger King yet. That show is the epitome of lighting in a bottle. If I recall correctly, the producers were going to make some documentary about exotic animal trafficking, and during their research they kept getting told 'you guys should check out those big cat people, they're nuts'. And then as they started looking into those claims they learned that those big cat people were indeed nuts. Then after all the craziness that they happened to capture on film (accidental suicide, weird sex cult, hiring a hit man to kill someone, hand getting bitten off, feeding expired meats from a Walmart, running for president, legal battles, ex-husband possibly a drug smuggling pilot in the 80s that goes missing, etc. etc. etc.), it releases right as the whole world is locked up at home thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime (so far) global pandemic. If that's not lightning in a bottle then I don't know what is. It doesn't have the same quality or staying power as some of the other shows mentioned here, but in terms of being in the right place at the right time, that show's gonna be hard to beat!
I agree. Put Making a Muderer in there too. What exemplifies the lighting for me is I have zero interest in seeing it again.
You said it didn't have to necessarily be TV, so I think we should talk about
1998 in Video Games
It was the platinum year in the golden era of gaming history. Every single platform rejoiced with the launch of genre defining and exclusive titles.
Nintendo was having a blow-out year, having launched the Gameboy Color. With it, Europe and the States received Pokemon Red & Blue while Japan received Pokemon Yellow. The full-color re-release of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX launched, with support for the Gameboy Printer that came out alongside the Camera over that summer. Meanwhile, the Nintendo 64 was being graced with titles such as Mario Party, Banjo-Kazooie, NFL Blitz, F-Zero X, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Turok 2, and the great console-seller, Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Sony was maintaining its stellar course, starting the year out right with Resident Evil 2, followed by titles like Xenogears, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, Mega Man Legends, Spyro the Dragon, MediEvil, Crash Bandicoot: Warped, and of course Metal Gear Solid.
Even the oft overlooked Sega Saturn was met with some of its most fondly remembered hits, such as Radiant Silvergun, Burning Rangers, House of the Dead, and the highly acclaimed Panzer Dragoon Saga. But this wasn't the only place that Sega was generating buzz. Japan—and lucky importers—were getting a taste of next-millenium gaming with the launch of the Sega Dreamcast, which, along with Sonic Adventure, slipped in just before the end of the year.
If that sounds like a crowded schedule already, imagine how PC gamers were feeling, coming right out of the gate with StarCraft. The must-play list would rapidly pile up from there with titles such as Fallout 2, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Thief: The Dark Project, Grim Fandango, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, Baldur's Gate, and Starsiege: Tribes, finishing strong with StarCraft: Broodwar. To stand out in such a momentous year, many games were delivering on the promises of 3D by introducing more innovative game designs. Others were refining tried and true models by incorporating stronger narrative immersion, which Half-Life delivered in droves that fall.
Now, other years would come close, like 2004 or 2007, but the online hype, the launch parties, the expo buzz, all of it initially reached lightspeed back in 1998. It's hard to overstate just how momentous this year was for those who remember it. What its undeniably successful titles demonstrated to a massive amount of people, more-so than ever before, was the potential of video games as an industry, a craft, entertainment, and cinematic experience. This is the year that showed people what could be done with video games. This is the year that made them mainstream.
Allow me to be a bit reductive, but I find that the capture of the zeitgeist and the associated lightning by World of Warcraft far outstrips 1998.
Nothing came close to punching through the veil of gaming into the mainstream as WoW did. It had TV ads with Mr. T! Who else could say that at the time?
I think you make a solid case, but it may also be worth mentioning that the absolutely fantastic World of Warcraft launched in 2004, while the "Night Elf Mohawk" ad campaign ran three years later, in 2007.
Personally, I don't feel that WoW knocked down any walls, but it did fill a massive amount of space that had been opened up by the state of the industry that preceded it. I would say that WoW was a great improvement over all of the work that EverQuest started five years prior. 1997's Ultima Online is where we got the term "MMORPG", but "EverCrack" set the stage for what WoW would improve on in almost every way. Titles like Diablo and StarCraft aided Blizzard's meteoric rise in 1997~98, establishing them as compelling story-tellers, fabulous game designers, and competent multiplayer managers. By the time WoW launched in 2004, however, people already knew what MMORPGs were because of the initial success of EverQuest—even though that title never quite reached the popularity of WoW.
Now, 2007 was a wonderfully busy year for video game ad campaigns:
Halo 3 - Starry Night
Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters - The Shrink Ray
God of War II - The End Begins
Mario Party 8 - Everybody Likes to Party
BioShock - Beyond the Sea
Metroid Prime 3 - Feel the Power
Halo 3 - Believe
Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass - The Legend Has Arrived
Beautiful Katamari - Rolling Your Way
Tomb Raider: Anniversary - Go Back to Your Past
Guitar Hero 3 - Is There a Guitar Hero in You?
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Wars Change
Assassin's Creed - Tear Drop
Mass Effect - Many Decisions Lie Ahead
Rock Band - "The"
My opinion is that by the time of WoW's launch in 2004, gaming was already ubiquitous. Three years later, it was only more so. Similarly, in order to stand out in such a packed 2007, Blizzard's marketing team needed something like Mr. T to make their ad campaign a little more unique.
Advertisements aside, if we're talking about the impact of singular titles, I would argue that such a crown should really go to Grand Theft Auto III, especially for the way that it furthered the success of the Playstation 2. It re-imagined the series by jumping to 3D and sparked a rabid popularity for a franchise that has managed to outlast the likes of Halo, Half-Life, and in some respects to today's relevancy, even Warcraft. GTA: III's portrayal of violence in the form of player freedoms garnered it both fame and infamy, achieving the kind of panicked headlines that had made Doom and Mortal Kombat household names just a few years prior.
Now, the Playstation 2 was the best selling console of its generation, and including the DVD player massively helped it. However, if a household did not care about games, they weren't more likely to buy a PS2 and additionally purchase the media remote when they could just buy a dedicated DVD player for around the same ~$300 price range. The Playstation 2 did so well because it catered to those households who were looking to upgrade both their home console and their VCR; people wanting to jump to the next generation of both games and home video had an easy, all-in-one solution.
For those who remember, the lack of DVD playback was frequently leveled against the Gamecube, and the mandatory purchase of the "DVD Dongle" hurt the Xbox's reputation. By spring 2001, Microsoft was quashing rumors that the Xbox might be able to play Dreamcast titles. Likewise, Nintendo apologists were doing what they can to wave away the need for backwards compatibility. Over on the Playstation front, however, Sony was able to boast the ability to play every single title it had ever released, all in one place. Now, if this wasn't enough in the looming midst of competitor console launches come Fall of 2001, Sony and Rockstar would debut their smash hit just two weeks before the highly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 2 (which had quite the TV ad campaign of its own), maintaining Sony's foothold that Christmas.
The following year, 2002, brought the launch of GTA: Vice City, and with it came its own TV ad campaign and record-breaking sales. In fact, Vice City sold more copies (5.97 million) in the U.S. during its first two years than WoW (1.4 million) did in the same span of time. At the end of that period came GTA: San Andreas, which didn't do as well as Vice City, but still managed to outsell all of its video game competitors in 2004, including WoW.
Of course, I am not trying to denigrate World of Warcraft. My point is more that by the time it came about, video games were basking in the accomplishments of their golden era. However, it cannot be denied that WoW was just so good that it was able to stand out in the midst of some of the most incredible titles of the time. It was so incredibly successful that it was able to gobble up 62% of the MMO market on its own. WoW still holds a crown as one of the highest grossing titles of all time ($12.8 billion), but not far behind it is GTA: V ($8.5 billion). Unfortunately, Fortnight has them both beat ($20 billion), and in a shorter span of time. But WoW nonetheless showed what could be done by the might of Blizzard after it had become a household name in 1997~98.
One last thing: for cheekiness sake, if we're really just talking about who could boast having Mr. T in their ads around the time of "Night Elf Mohawk", Snickers managed to book the A-Team legend:
Snickers: Get Some Nuts - Football
Snickers: Get Some Nuts - Speedwalker
EDIT: spelling and clarity
Breaking Bad. It could have been another forgettable crime drama but for the phenomenal cast.
Battlestar Galactica reboot. What they managed to create right in the midst of so many other completely awful Syfy shows was really impressive. The characters drew us in and we cheered when they escaped yet another attack. It declined near the end but the season1 launch was amazing.
Mythbusters. This is probably more in line with the topic of a show about some blokes just fooling around but their actual passion for the science pushed it way beyond that.
The cast and the writing, which sets up all sorts of stuff the audience can miss or wonder about, until it's used in the plot down the line. There's even a flash forward set seasons earlier and paid off in the finale.
Yeah it definitely had more going for it but Jessie was supposed to be killed off in season1 but the chemistry was so good they made him a co-star.
Oh totally. But it's easy from credits and from press coverage to focus on one particular aspect - like actors, directors, or writers - despite movies and TV being a fundamentally collaborative effort. For example, the Saw franchise owes a lot of its identity to its editor, Kevin Greutert (who later became the series' director), and the same for the Star Wars original trilogy, Marcia Lucas. Or heck, look at the music from all three - Charlie Clouser, John Williams, Dave Porter. The three main positions of acting, writing, and directing have huge creative input into the work, but neither is it fair to isolate one of them and put all blame or all credit to it (unless we get a look into production or inside stories etc).
Mythbusters was the first thing I thought of when I read the title. There are tons of science shows out there, but Mythbusters had a great concept, great hosts and (most importantly) great chemistry between those hosts. That combination elevates it to another level.
It’s been off the air for nearly a decade so it’s faded in the cultural memory somewhat but it was huge when it was on. I think part of that is because while Adam has gone on to do Tested, the remaining hosts have all been a lot more low profile. But at the time, they were everywhere, even going on tour with a science show and museum exhibit.
A lot of the best movies and TV shows are like that so I will try to get some out of the way: Seinfeld (the sitcom), Friends, The IT Crowd, Back to the Future, Godfather, The Exorcist, Star Trek TOS, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, several Doctors from Doctor Who, Alien (1979), The X-Files, Twin Peaks, The Beatles, The Leftovers... really, pretty much any masterpiece or major cultural phenomenon captured lightning in a bottle in some way.
Maybe others will come up with more original contributions... but yeah. There are lots of lightnings in a bottle out there.
Seinfeld was pretty much a cultural juggernaut, EVERYONE watched that show back in the 90's, even my strictly christian parents who tut-tutted the sex jokes but still laughed at the rest.
Yeah that's a good point, this question is pretty close to just asking what pieces of iconic media there are. I think maybe more what I'm trying to ask is for things that are greater than they had any right to be, because of the people involved ie. Top Gear being a show of three blokes talking about cars, has every right to be boring but isn't. Seinfeld is a great example, the archetypal show about nothing.
Another variation of this question would be what are some currently airing things that are likely to make their way into this category. For me – referencing some things often discussed here – the pairing of Greg and Alex on Taskmaster would be one, or Ben and Adam on Jet Lag, or some of the combos of cast members on Gamechanger. They all have that same way of bouncing off each other that is highly entertaining.
True detective season 1. I've lost count of my rewatches. Just magical.
Might be nostalgia, but i think cartoons in the late 90s and early 2000's were in a kind of sweet spot. There were three big networks airing cartoons and they weren't under the serious scrutiny to be totally child-friendly, so they could be more experimental and/or weird (The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and Ed, Edd 'n Eddy), or tackle some more serious topics that modern censors would freak out over.
Static Shock remains one of my all-time favorite cartoons in part because it tackled some heavy topics like gang violence and school shootings. Seriously, I'm just impressed at how it handled these serious, grounded topics that even live-action shows aimed at older audiences struggle with capturing. Meanwhile, Batman Beyond is just one if the darkest cartoons, like holy shit how did it have ANY recurring villains?? Season one seemed to imply that every villain died at the end of the episode, and it had some genuine fates worse than death. I don't think either show could be made for the same demographic today.
Outside the kids' sphere, early Adult Swim had some fun times. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law and Sealab 2021 remain some of my all-time favorite shows. You can just tell that everyone working on them had a big blast, they're not over-produced or clearly trying to meet some big deadline. They were made at a low-stakes time, and so they're just light and fun.
Then at the end of that era, Naruto came along at the perfect time to go mainstream. It was still at the time that most adults put anime in the same "for kids" mental box as cartoons. If it came out today, it wouldn't have been dubbed for kids. Even with the censorship, Naruto was violent and dark. The first big arc includes an impoverished country under control of a tyrannical businessman, and the antagonists dying in a pretty heart-wrenching sequence. And that set the tone for the rest of the series.
But damn if that didn't make it way more fun than any other show. The stakes were high, the action was awesome, and even the goofiest characters were cool. I remember one scene where two characters casually commented on how many invaders they'd taken down as a casual competition before going back to fighting, and it's stuck in my head ever since as a super cool moment. I loved it, but even as a kid part of me knew that my parents probably wouldn't approve if they realized how serious it was.
Yeah, Naruto was released at just the right time to get the largest international audience possible. I think it would've been successful no matter what, but its sheer level of popularity really does boil down to being released during the right sweet spot.
MASH after the first couple of seasons and especially the final episode. Major Houlihan becoming a serious character was a big part of what worked. However, there were many brilliant characters in the show.
It’s probably worth mentioning pro wrestling in this thread. It was never an interest of mine, but there was about a decade, maybe a little longer, starting in the late ‘80s, when it was everywhere. Something about the hypermasculinity, pageantry, and spectacle of excess really resonated with the zeitgeist back then.
Like I said, I didn’t follow it at all but I still know about Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Ric Flare, Sting, Steve Austin, The Rock, and The Undertaker. Not to mention the drama around WWF/WWE, WCW, TNA, and NWO. You couldn’t escape wrestling’s gravity. I think in the years before the internet really took off there were a lot of people who still bought into the kayfabe and took it quite seriously.
I struggle separating what stuff hit people in my situation/age group in a big way and what was actually a huge deal everywhere.
But I think
Inside the NBA with Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, and Shaq. When it's gone, the fun in NBA media will be gone, and I don't think it could be replicated.
True Detective season 1 and Twin Peaks, as noted by other commenters.
Weird one, but Woodstock '94. I mean just read the Wikipedia page for the line-up and notable events. It's like nostalgic fanfic!
Top Gear is such a fantastic example. It was so approachable and watchable even to non car people that not only was it entertaining for millions, it also exponentially grew the car community. Top Gear is the reason I became interested in cars. I started watching when I was 18 and in college in 2010 (so it had already been running for a while) and because of that, in the years after, I started buying sports cars, working on cars, and fell into motorsport, not just as a viewer, but I’ve had the opportunity to race cars and work on race cars. TG was a life changing show for me in a good way and cars are now my main interest because of it. I’m sure millions share my experience , as well.
I know it isn’t TV, but I like the topic in general and one other lighting in a bottle I’d like to mention is Baldur’s Gate 3. The conditions for that game to blow up were absolutely perfect. We were just starting to come out of the pandemic, but somewhat still in it and people were staying home and the pandemic created millions of new gamers, especially PC gamers. People were starting to tire of live service, micro transaction laden games, and D&D had been more popular than ever, but I still couldn’t imagine a CRPG of D&D absolutely blowing up like Baldur’s Gate 3 did. I’m still really not sure what the exact catalyst is, but I remember feeling chills when it came out and not only was it a generational game in terms of quality, but it was flying off of (digital) shelves. I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing, that a fucking dungeons and dragons video game was becoming one of the greatest games of all time in real time.
Was it the bear sex marketing that gave it a push on TikTok or something or was I massively underestimating the audience for a CRPG set in D&D? Larian’s previous games had been good games and sold well for their genre, but I never ever would have expected what actually happened. Even talking about it now, a year and a half later, it’s still almost unbelievable to me that a game in a somewhat hard to play genre absolutely blew up like that.
I still can't believe how Hasbro dropped the ball twice in a row on that one...
They had a literal Forgotten Realms movie months prior, which was actually good, but marketed it poorly. (Basically the usual "we're sorry we made this nerd film, but go watch it" stuff.) And they didn't drop the name Forgotten Realms and try to get it into the public consciousness.
Then BG3 came out, was wildly popular and...still no attempts to connect the two, and then they apparently pissed off Larian enough they didn't want to do DLC or a follow up game.
Oh yeah, and they did the whole licensing debacle in the middle of that.
I don't think that it was Hasbros fault that Larian moved on.
I saw an interview with Swen Vincke, the head of Larian studios, where he declared that - after working on it for a long time - the whole studio was basically burned out on the world of Baldurs Gate gate, and they all were happy and relieved when he decided to not keep working on DLC content.
That sounded believable, especially because Vincke probably has much more ambitious plans for the studio than being the 'DND guys' for the next decade. Not following the easy money and choosing to keep the motivation of his employees high is also something that totally makes sense for them.
Most of the series I wanted to mention are already captured by others in the thread, so I'm going to throw in White Lotus.
I haven't engaged with any of the online communities surrounding this show, but anecdotally, this has become the series that I here people recommend to each other constantly. Having just caught up with the most recent series, I'm inclined to think this is one of those lightning in a bottle shows. Season 2, in particularly, just slapped.
Here is media of lightning really captured in a bottle.