SPOILERS for Star Trek Enterprise potentially
I was noticing it was tough for me to get into shows that started after the 2000s, and talking to someone I mused about how it must be because of 9/11. I was watching Enterprise at the time, on the season just before 2001, and sure enough, the episodes after 9/11 had a complete shift in tone, the show becoming basically 24, sci-fi War on Terror immediately. It’s like a parody of ‘if Starfleet had to make the hard choices to make America safe from space Al Qaeda’ or something. Overall the show is better than I was expecting though, still got me hooked on the trekness.
It was clear there was a cultural shift after 9/11, especially in the mainstream US media. It was interesting to be able to see it so distinctly in a show that went from the pre- to post- era. Does anyone else have any good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?
Not really what you’re after, but the movie The Rock with Cage and Connery is from 1996 and it is extremely pre-911, just no possible way it could be made afterwards. It was a big budget blockbuster about US marines going rogue and aiming chemical weapons at San Francisco. If it had been made 10 years earlier, it would have been ex-soviet mercenaries, if it had been made 10 years later then it would have been Arab terrorists, and if it was made today, the marines would have been aiming chemical weapons at Portland and they would be the good guys. Instead however, it was made in that short few years when America had no “real” enemies and so the only bad guys powerful enough to do bad guy things to America was the US military itself.