How TV looked 10 years ago

STREAM OF STORIES

- RAJA SEN

Phoebe Waller-Bridge in 'Fleabag', which dropped in 2016.

Right now, social media apparently cares what we looked like 10 years ago.

Many people you know, from your neighbour to your favourite movie star, are posting pictures of themselves looking younger—but often not that much younger. Just like superhero movies that feel the need to reboot their IP every few years or neighbourhood cafes that change their name and playlist every other season, we appear to have developed an incredibly short attention span for nostalgia itself. Yet beware of the rosy tint of flashbacks, for 2016 was no idyll. It was the year of Brexit, the year of demonetisation, and the year Donald Trump was elected to the presidency.

A year, in short, where everyone got everything wrong.

Still, 2016 was also the year Netflix and Amazon Prime came to India, so looking back on what we were watching might actually be interesting. In case Instagram were to wonder what this particular space in this particular newspaper looked like back then, well then I must say that it looked anticlimactically the same. I started this column back in 2016, and clearly have since watched far more television shows than is good for me.