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my parents are watching Spaced and it really is a picture of Gen-X pathology
Spaced is objectively speaking a good show. Excellently written and acted, a directorial style that was innovative at the time (although deeply dweeby now), some actual observation/humanity in it, etc
it also has the kind of queerbaity relationship with homophobia that will write same-sex romance with a performative lack of squick and big, big irony quotes, and combined with the absolutely indefensible transphobia you can see a real tension
Spaced is a world of narcissists who smoke indoors who congratulate themselves for not freaking out around gay people but also punch t-words in the face for a laugh line
i'm just never going to be able to explain to people who were children in the 1970s that seeing the t-word used in a sitcom without irony is pretty much how your generation feels about Love Thy Neighbour or similar shit like that. of COURSE everyone on the show is a terf now
the other thing is that the characters are crying over how horrible their lives are when they have a big modern flat in London with a landlady who lets them have a dog for ÂŁ90/w. it's the last moment when young people could actually, like, afford to do anything
Tim's nerdiness is considered by the other characters to be part of an incomprehensible subculture, which is also a real snapshot of a time before young people were considered freak weirdos for not gaming
(the references to Tim's video games have clearly been made by people who GET how games work, which it honestly does better than any modern show I've seen, but also it's considered inherently funny and degrading that Tim works in a comic shop)
unsurprisingly it's saturated in the 70s, from the tone (70s House Sitcom) to the references and flashbacks (a flashback to Tim's childhood is shot in grainy undersaturated film to look like a 1970s BBC Outside Shoot) to Daisy's idea of a party (tinfoil deco and celery sticks!)
again this is not like 'Spaced is cancelled' or anything and "90s sitcom is transphobic" is almost below comment but THIS is what the generation who are TERFs now thought about themselves when they were young - that they were cool, urbane, a bit geeky, but with gritted teeth
there's this fear and discomfort to the show, like how Daisy's rejected for being insufficiently 'postfeminist' for a magazine which Tim says is for 'lesbians', but Daisy herself (while the amount of story/funny moments she gets still feels modern) is very girly and domestic
gender roles in the new millennium were breaking down and everyone was in a state of panic while earnestly trying to pretend they weren't
it also feels kind of petty to point out that everyone on the show is white but seriously not a single person on the show so far is not white
there's two sitcoms both from about this time aimed at The Youth that get a laugh out of the hook from My Baby Is The Centrefold, and the other of which is Nathan Barley, which has not dated whatsoever
in Spaced it's Daisy's cringey and inept party playlist, used to define her as a tasteless moron. in Nathan Barley it's part of Nathan's ironic mashup DJ set... used to define him as part of a microspecifically cool, obnoxious subculture
part of the joke in Nathan Barley is that you hate him, of course you absolutely hate him, but at the same time he's sometimes genuinely funny and creative. his sample of Centrefold is funny and annoying, but it's supposed to be. That's why the crowd cheers his set
at the time Spaced was considered the voice of the youth of today, and Nathan Barley a satire of such a niche community that it would be instantly dated and incomprehensible. but it's Spaced that now feels like a museum piece, while Nathan Barley just is life right now
and that's not even just the subject matter, it's that Spaced has this defensiveness. It's nervous you won't like the show being about a geek and a woman and the point of view the show takes is the defensive, grouchy mindset of Tim
but in Nathan Barley, Dan's the only real cynic, and even that's because he's a member of the older half-generation who related to Spaced realising he doesn't fit in Nathan's Xennial nightmare world. There's a reason the show ultimately sides with Nathan's annoying exhuberence
if you compare the sitcom Nathan to the TVGoHome Nathan, which was contemperanous with Spaced, he's a much more nasty and cynical character, actually sexually assaulting women and much more insecure about his clothes and weight
i don't know. i'm not old enough to remember the turn of the Millennium in any real detail. I do ultimately admire Spaced for one specific thing, which is the part where it just plays a cutscene from the original Resident Evil, complete with its infamous voice acting
