In 100 years, these are the cultural moments we'd want people to know got us through the pandemic.
In this time of relative calm, it's possible to see the past three years as not just a crisis of public health but also a distinct cultural era with its own emerging canon. |
 | | Illustration by The New York Times |
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It all started with "Schitt's Creek." |
If you're a fan of the amiable Canadian sitcom that premiered in 2015, which everyone suddenly seemed to be obsessed with circa 2020 while it was streaming on Netflix, you may also remember that it did something remarkable in its sixth and final season: It swept the seven major Emmy comedy categories, something no sitcom — not "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," not "M*A*S*H*," not "Seinfeld" — had ever accomplished. |
So … what happened there, exactly? |
Possibly you believe that "Schitt's Creek" is, in fact, the greatest TV comedy of all time. More likely, we might now understand that as the Covid-19 pandemic was plunging us into isolation, anxiety and dread, the show's sweet and soothing charms were serving an urgent public function. |
Now, maybe for you, the pop culture artifact that exemplifies this phenomenon isn't "Schitt's Creek" — maybe it's that calming baking show or that complicated board game or that eerily prescient novel or that very weird movie. One way or another, there are cultural touchstones we'll always associate with life in the past three years because they captured, inadvertently or not, what living through that period felt like. |
And that's how Times Opinion's Cultural Canon of the Pandemic Era was born. |
To create the canon, we approached roughly a dozen of the smartest and most opinionated cultural critics we know and asked them: If you were putting one cultural artifact in a time capsule so that people in 100 years could better understand life during the pandemic, what would you choose? |
In their answers, some of these writers confirmed our pre-existing hunches. (Yes, Taylor Swift is in there.) Some of them surprised us entirely. (I can safely say we did not expect, at the outset, to include an argument about Kim Kardashian's loungewear line.) We asked writers for artifacts whose cultural significance felt universal ("We couldn't escape it!"), not personal ("This is the album I listened to on my daily walk"). In the end, "Schitt's Creek" didn't even make the cut, though a similarly soothing sitcom phenomenon did. |
All of these writers make compelling cases as to why their choices will forever be connected with this era. But more than that, in creating this canon, we learned a bit about the culture and a lot about ourselves: what we craved, what we feared, where we found comfort and how we found joy. |
Once you've read through our canon (and who knows, maybe you'll even find something to disagree with), please leave a comment and let us know which essential cultural artifacts you would include in a Covid time capsule and why. |
| SEE THE FULL PROJECT HERE | | |
Illustration credit: ("Folklore") Beth Garrabrant, Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Kevin Kane/WireImage, via Getty ("Dior") Ryan Lowry for The New York Times, Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Republic Records ("Ted Lasso") Apple TV+ ("Love Is Blind") Netflix and Marcus Ingram/Getty Images for Netflix ("White Lotus") Photographs by Fabio Lovino and Mario Perez/HBO |
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