Much like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the 2000’s are coming back stronger and more powerful than ever. Culturally - we can’t get enough of the early aughts. Between the Friends reunion, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reunion, the iCarly reboot, the resurgence of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and the many, many Tik Toks, we’re seeing more early 2000’s content than we have since…well you know when.
This isn’t to say we’ve covered the entire era in rose-colored Ray-Bans. Anne Helen Petersen recently wrote about the rampant fatphobia of the ‘90s and early 2000s, and Spencer Kornhaber wrote about how we are grappling with the realization that a lot of the songs and styles we loved “are now said to be the products of exploitation”. Kornhaber goes further to describe how our current situation has sparked the desire to look back:
“Emerging tentatively from a pandemic and an apocalyptic political period, American culture seems hungry for a return to boom-time frivolity, but without the toxic social environment that underlaid it.”
That idea that we want to return to the fun part of a time period and remove the bad parts is understandable and worrisome.
I will admit, it’s tempting to get lost in early 2000s culture. Sex and the City and The Sopranos is a refreshing change of pace from the highly stylized, glossy shows that have become the norm of contemporary television. Seeing characters go to bars and diners and underground parties packed with sweaty people was about as close as I could get to the real thing. And as we have all spent the last year looking at screens for the majority of our days, watching shows where cell phones don’t exist was like stepping into another, simpler world.
But I fear that longing for the early aughts ignores all the social and political change that we’ve gone through. I understand wanting to live in a time before a global pandemic (we all do!), but I don’t want to go back to a time before widespread awareness of movements like Black Lives Matter, before our recent reckoning with hate crimes and prejudices against AAPI communities, and before the #MeToo movement unveiled harassment and abuse. We are still grappling with our actions from the early 2000s, from collectively acknowledging the media circus around Britney Spears to individually taking responsibility for our past content. Ignoring all those transgressions would also ignore the work we’ve tried to do to fix them.
If we want to hold the good old days of bold patterns and flip phones in one hand, we have to simultaneously hold the discomfort and pain it caused in another, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Reunion actually provides a pretty good template for that. In the special, Will Smith meets with the original Aunt Vivian, Janet Hubert. Hubert, who became pregnant during season three and was having issues in her personal life, was labeled as “difficult” by a young Smith and eventually forced off the show and replaced by Daphne Maxwell Reid. During the special, Smith and Hubert meet (for the first time in 27 years) and discuss what happened. Hubert does not let Smith off easy, nor should she. She tells him frankly and sternly how his words, his actions as a young man, affected her career:
“Words can kill. I lost everything. Reputation. Everything. And I understand you were able to move forward, but you know those words, calling a Black woman difficult in Hollywood, is the kiss of death. And it’s hard enough being a dark-skinned Black woman in this business.”
It’s admittedly a hard scene to watch. Up to that point, the entire special was largely about reminiscing about the fond memories of Fresh Prince. The actors sat around the living room set and talked about everything from their auditions to their now-iconic dances. Smith’s decision to meet with Hubert came at the cost of bursting the nostalgia bubble that they all loved so dearly. But it had to be done. Much to its credit, the reunion held two contradictory ideas simultaneously: that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was a groundbreaking show for mainstream Black representation, even as it was actively pushing out a dark-skinned woman. So we do the same for the 2000s, an era that embraced bright colors and bubblegum pop, even as they hid exploitation and abuse.
This year has not been easy, but it hasn’t been a wash either. We created more inclusive, diverse shows and movies, we continued to have conversations about social justice and accountability, and we tried (and sometimes failed) to learn from our past mistakes. It’s hard to sit in the middle space between the world we envision and the one we’re working on, but I wouldn’t trade that work for all the Juicy Couture sweatsuits in the world.