Since then, I think we may have unwittingly lost some cultural ground due to the ever-increasing diversification of culture.
In the early 2000s, thirty million people watched Ellen’s coming out episode because that’s how we consumed culture twenty years ago.
Even then, with cable and satellite TV and the beginnings of online video, Americans tended to be more familiar with the same major cultural touchstones, because we had limited choices in entertainment compared to today, when Netflix could drop a multi-million-dollar series that nobody you know hears about because the algorithm doesn’t recommend it to you amidst the practically infinite options.
