VH1's "I Love the..." Series Was Flawed But Necessary
Just try and find another series that talks about GEICO's Caveman commercials
If CNN’s decades-spanning miniseries is about looking at the past reverentially, like you would an old photograph of your grandparents, VH1’s I Love the… series is like looking at the past as if it were a picture of yourself from sixth grade, with mortification and amusement.
The I Love the… series consists of episodes broken down by year that cover the most prominent cultural conversations of the day. It features talking heads made up of actors, comedians, musicians, and other celebrities that come in and discuss their experiences with certain trends (reminiscing on the bulkiness of their first iPods or the power of TiVo) as well as how they saw the culture change as a whole. The idea of the show wasn’t to educate people on the most significant trends from a political or sociological perspective - just to talk about the trends that dominated water cooler chats, dinner parties, and other get-togethers.
The scope of those trends were vast, and left no stone unturned. In “I Love the 2000s” the show dedicated entire segments to things like Budweiser’s “Wazzzzuuuuuup” commercial and Dude Where’s My Car? In fact, which Hal Sparks (who was in Dude Where’s My Car?) describes the critical reception of the film, and in turn, the ethos of the I Love the… series as a whole.
My favorite thing about Dude, Where’s My Car? is when people thought it was stupid. It’s called “Dude”, the first word is dude! Dude, Where’s My Car? The title is a question! Do you think I read the script for Dude, Where’s My Car? and thought, “Well….it’s Oscar time.”
To say that I Love the… series was dumb or frivolous because it focused on these more absurd topics was to miss the point of the series. It aired on VH1! One of the talking heads was Tommy Chong! Ken Burns this is not.
The show did also talk about more mainstream topics - it discusses things like the papal succession from John Paul II to Benedict XVI and The DaVinci Code, but it just throws in the everyday trends alongside those more serious topics. In a sense, the refusal to separate the cultural events is one of the series’ greatest strengths. It didn’t matter if the culture was high-brow or low-brow, if it was a big deal that year, it was discussed. Yet the show, and the I Love the 80s series in particular, still found its fair share of criticism. Charles Soukup argues in the Southern Communication Journal that the format of the show often used cultural references as talking points instead of talking about the“actual issue”.
Instead of talking about corporate corruption via real people and real events, the producers emphasize the film Wall Street and the character Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas (Ross, 2002 g). The complicated geopolitical tensions of the Cold War are addressed via movies such as War Games (Ross, 2002f) and Stripes (Ross, 2002c). Instead of discussing the real racial tensions of the 1980s, the producers emphasize Do the Right Thing (Ross, 2002e) and rap music (Ross, 2002d). These additional layers of mediation (or the ‘‘prism’’ of a simulation of reality) allow for ironic distance even when addressing morally complex historical events. The kitschy hyperreality of filmic and television texts provides a safe moral detachment for the celebrity respondents when discussing events that radically and irrevocably transformed millions of lives.
But I would argue that talking about the culture around the issue is talking about the issue. This isn’t to say the hard facts - statistics, dates, names - are irrelevant. They are certainly important, but the cultural stamp of Do The Right Thing endures because it is so powerful in its ability to communicate the racial tensions of 1989. The culture we consume is just as significant as the “real” societal issues they center on and vice versa - we can use Watchmen as a tool to understand the Black Lives Matter movement, and we can see how the proliferation of I Think You Should Leave as political commentary represents our exasperation with the political systems as a whole. Talking about the culture is not detaching ourselves from the issue, it’s talking about the issue with a shared vocabulary of characters and plot points.
The scope of the I Love the… series was wider than just pure TV/film culture - it discussed sports news, politics, celebrity gossip, fashion, brand trends, and even technological advancements. That kind of format can seem like they’re speeding through seemingly random topics at breakneck speed, but it feels more true to how we actually view society as we live it. Other documentaries or series’ will often separate the topics (CNN’s “The Nineties” has separate episodes on politics, music, television, and social issues), which is perhaps a more organized way of classifying information, but lacks the interconnectivity of how those facets of society interact with each other. We read a New York Times piece on NFTs in the morning, chat with coworkers about a new television show in the afternoon, then listen to music to wind down at night.
As Jessica MacLeash notes in her piece for The Ringer, the I Love the… series helped teach cultural touchstones that, even without their full context, are significant -
Someone who’s never seen the TV show Dallas might, thanks to I Love the ’80s, still understand how important the question “Who shot JR?” was in 1980. Does that mean they can claim they’ve seen or truly know Dallas? No. Does it mean they know what it was like to live through the ’70s or ’80s? No. Does it mean that they’d be able to understand a JR joke made in the Season 4 finale of Jane the Virgin nearly 30 years later? Yup. Sometimes that’s good enough.
The questions of “Who shot JR?” isn’t just a throwaway reference, or a wink to people who did, in fact, watch Dallas, it is a distillation of a cultural moment - a shorthand for a scenario where a show leaves audiences with a powerful cliffhanger, or where millions are left wondering what happens next. Dallas was Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones - and understanding that connection helps us understand the history of how television shows become sensations.
I cannot in good conscience wholly recommend watching the series today without noting some caveats. Many of the bits and jokes haven’t aged well, some of the talking heads have since been outed as abusive and problematic. It’s a product of its time period, and as I’ve written before, nostalgia is a prickly concept. But the lessons from the I Love the… series are worth holding onto - the history of culture is important, the interconnectivity of our cultural discussions are significant, high and low culture can and should be discussed in the same breath. These are lessons we can take away from the program, ones that I hope result in a (less problematic) I Love the 2020s series.