The decade that finally changed television forever

Over the past 10 years streaming has changed our viewing habits. But that’s not all, suggests Ed Power: as television and cinema hurtle into the new decade, it is even harder to tell where one ends and the other begins

Game of Thrones: in the end, size mattered (Rex)

Television as we knew it 10 years ago no longer exists. As a new decade loomed in late 2009, TV was brooding, aggressive, masculine. This was the golden age of the “Difficult Man”, as epitomised by Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Mad Men’s Don Draper and, slightly earlier, the sociopathic Tony Soprano. The great shows of the era were a tapestry of knotted brows, disastrous domestic lives and barely contained white male fury.

All these years on, angry men raging against the unfairness of life are harder to empathise with. That was the demographic that voted for Brexit and which put Donald Trump – the ultimate difficult man – in the White House. Walter White would, you imagine, have loved the can-do swagger and aversion to facts that define Boris Johnson. Today difficult men are running the world. The idea of them ruling television, too, is mildly less appealing than it was in 2009.

TV, like politics, has gone bigger and louder in the interim. But it has nurtured the weirdo within too. The 2010s were the decade of mind-blowing spectacles such as Game of Thrones and Stranger Things, where in the end it really was just size that mattered.