The British crime drama Broadchurch came out in 2013. John Favreau’s food porn vanity project Chef was released in 2014. Despite both now being more than a decade old, in my mind they are still filed under “new things that came out that we missed because we had an infant in the house while also being medical residents”. It was therefore jarring to see how dated they both were, and for similar reasons.
Broadchurch deals with the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a small coastal community. Twitter is mentioned a handful of times, only in the context of breaking news. There is no Instagram or messaging apps: pre-teens email each other. The boy’s family is at a loss for how to attract national attention to the killing and finds the answer in a tabloid journalist. It all feels quaint, though admittedly I don’t know if that was intentional even in 2013 (from the edgy music and the oh-so serious tone of the show, I suspect not). I won’t mention a recent British show by name for fear of spoiling other, but if you’ve seen both you will now what is the clear parallel and how much things have changed.
Chef, on the other hand, is completely Twitter-dependent, and is arguably one of the first movies to use Twitter #MainCharacter dynamics as a plot point (Justine Sacco had landed a few months before the movie was released, and probably wasn’t even on Favreau’s radar). Twitter is shown in a completely positive light, and I can’t think of any other movie that has done that. It is also a good time capsule of the food trucks on Twitter craze. The early 2010s were the peak time for both, before culture wars killed one and covid the other.
So now I am inclined to see what else came out in that 2010–2015 period. Is it too early to be nostalgic for those times?