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To be fair, honestly most of us are in grimdark phase right now anyway because so much of our real world society is falling apart. You’ve undoubtedly been reading the descriptions of Philadelphia here. Or if not you’ve seen the ruins of most major cities with bars on the windows, trash in the streets, drug use and homeless people everywhere one looks. Where taking public transportation is an exercise in risk management during the day and unsafe at night. Where kids no longer expect to live as well as their parents even as they must work ever harder to not fall into poverty from the cost of living and debts and lack of real opportunities even though those kids worked extremely hard to get where they are. It is not exactly surprising that the grandkids of people who watched the original show resent that their grandparents believed in a hopeful optimistic future where there’s no poverty and people can live a life they want when the promise is not only no closer to being delivered, we’re actually farther away from many of them than we were in the 1960s.
Philadelphia was that way in the early 2000s too (it got better in the interim), worse before that or so I'm told, and media wasn't so grimdark.
Media was dark back when it was worse, but it wasn't grimdark and it was good.
And it could play its darkness off really lightly. Crocodile Dundee is very family friendly for how it portrays the dregs of Manhattan in the 1980's.
Yes, media was less dark, but the reality was at least as dark if not darker (certainly Manhattan and Philadelphia were worse)
Kind of interesting how, as things get better, the outlook gets bleaker.
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I don't know who "most of us" is. There are problems I find intractable at present, yes, but that said, if you asked me if I'd rather live today or in the 60s (without any tricks like "You get to know the next 60 years of history and can make decisions accordingly," etc.) I would definitely choose today.
Reminds me of all the black people who insist America today is not even a little bit better for black people than in the days of slavery. I just flat-out don't believe they actually believe this.
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