Opening Argument

Recently someone tweeted a photo collage of Gen-X comedians whose faces would be instantly and fondly recalled by any millennial who had access to VH1 in the ’00s. The accompanying text was straight-to-the-point, and pure: “I miss the I Love… series!!! #throwback #VH1”

VH1’s I Love… series, for the unfortunate souls who never experienced the pleasures of its company during an hours-long marathon on a Saturday afternoon, was a wacky lo-fi clip show that good-naturedly mocked pop culture from the past. Inspired by a BBC series, the American iteration premiered in 2002 with a retrospective on the ’80s, followed by the ’70s, ’90s, and various offshoots.

As that tweet reminiscing about the good ol’ days of I Love… made the rounds amongst us wistful 30- and 40-somethings, the responses fell largely into two camps: Those who proudly admitted to once aspiring to fill the role of “deadpan commentator on a nostalgic clip show” (i.e., Michael Ian Black, truly the MVP), and those who used it to point out the unique role the series played in teaching us millennials about some show called The Waltons and the pet rock craze.

There’s something to that latter observation. Alongside retro cable programming like Nick at Nite and docuseries like Behind the Music, I Love… helped many of us cultivate a superficial sense of what it was like to exist in the times before we were born. It was about as unserious and ostensibly slap-dash of an enterprise as it could get. There were cheesy recurring gags (“The Foxy Ladies of [insert year here],” as voted on by an invisible committee of VH1, for one). There was, for whatever reason, a chimpanzee. The overall aesthetic screamed “mid-’90s screensaver.”

Ken Burns this was not: Each episode moved at rapid-fire pace between subjects and observations, barely scratching the surface of any one cultural artifact or thought. An assortment of character actors, B- and C-list standup comedians, and musicians provided the silly commentary. Most of it boiled down to, “Remember this ridiculous thing we all enjoyed back then? Wasn’t that … ridiculous???” *wink wink*

But the chaos and simplicity of its presentation was the draw, and the draw may have helped bridge some kind of generational gap. It lodged random old-school facts into our brains so that we may wield them decades later during bar trivia, wowing Gen-Xers who are surprised that someone as young as us would remember Small Wonder. (We don’t; but we do remember Juliette Lewis remembering the 10-year-old robot girl on I Love the ’80s: 1985.) It may have made the most curious among us seek out some of the music, shows and movies that got namechecked on the series.

In a way, Twitter can sometimes function as I Love… once did, but without the structure and ease of access. For some time now, it’s been the millennial generation’s turn to sit on chairs in front of ugly green screens and wax poetic about the silly pleasures of “The Thong Song,” and we do (online, sans green screens), but it can seem like the culture isn’t being passed down as effectively. Regularly, the 30+ crowd on the internet finds itself rolling its eyes at the (presumably) Gen Z set for, say, being confused by seeing Childish Gambino in a classroom among a bunch of students who “look 30 years old.” (It’s a still from Community, and Chevy Chase must be delighted that anyone thinks he looks 30 years old.)

It’s natural to be an old(er) person worrying about the preservation of the past for the future, and that too many people, regardless of age, have little historical context for the now. There are real conversations to be had about how art like early hip-hop or classic cinema are in danger of being forgotten; thank goodness for the dream hamptons and Martin Scorseses of the world. But perhaps this tiny corner of the internet isn’t telling the whole story. Alanis Morissette’s influence is all over Olivia Rodrigo, and one of the sweetest viral trends of the last few years involved two young brothers listening to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” for the first time, so #notallGenZ, etc.

Maybe there aren’t necessarily fewer ways to engage with the past, just different ways, like YouTube, podcasts, Stranger Things, and, of course, TikTok. Some of those engagements can be just as silly and surface-level as I Love…, and there’s certainly a world where an updated version of the series returns and thrives in the short attention-span realm of social media.

And perhaps it’s also possible millennials’ cultural literacy is being just a tad bit overstated – or at least, sugarcoated – in the discourse around things like I Love … There are so many other factors beyond age determining what we know and have been exposed to: race, nationality, hometown, whether or not your parents were immigrants, how old your parents were when you were born, and so on. Until last week, I’d barely registered that The Talking Heads are the ones who performed “Psycho Killer.” Did Mo Rocca crack jokes about it on VH1?