I’m sure that some of you in the audience have experienced this before, whether Sally Draper gave you flashbacks on Mad Men, or movies like The Wedding Singer, Take Me Home Tonight, and Hot Tub Time Machine revived painful memories of eighties fashions. But I think it’s finally my turn to have pop culture make me feel old: we finally have enough instances to make a trend, and 1990s period pieces are officially a thing.

The evidence started building in 2008 with the release of the underrated* romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe, which starred Ryan Reynolds as a former Democratic political operative turned ad man who lost and found the loves of his life while working first on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, and later in New York Mayoral politics. Then came Notorious, the 2009 biopic of rapper Christopher Wallace, who released the seminal album Ready to Die in 1994, only to be murdered three years later. And now, it seems, the dam has broken. A biopic of the R&B-pop crossover group TLC is in the works. And the nineties have crossed over to television, where Fox has picked up Surviving Jack, a comedy that stars Law & Order: Special Victims Unit veteran Chris Meloni as a father raising his son in Souther California “in a time before ‘coming of age’ was something you could Google.” It’s a fascinating moment, even if it makes my bones feel creaky, because I have no idea how Hollywood is going to decide are the signature conflicts and causes of this decade.

To a certain extent, it makes a lot of sense that the early attempts at 1990s period movies have been biopics, and particularly biopics about hip-hop and R&B artists. The rise of those forms, and the conquest of popular music by forms invented, popularized, and perfected by African-American artists are two of the signature cultural shifts and conflicts of the decade, and it’s wise of Hollywood to have identified them. Movies like these are appealing, too, because audiences are already attached to and interested in their subjects. Wallace’s murder remains unsolved, and his death remains a subject of fevered speculation a decade and a half after the fact. The death of Lisa Lopes, one-third of the original lineup of TLC, in 2002, has a clearer cause—she died in a car crash—but given that she was only 30 at the time, her early demise makes fans eager to cling to the period of her life that remains available to them.
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I have a long-standing fondness for folk music such that I would have been happy to watch a feature-length version of the Greenwich Village section of I’m Not There, so I’m curious to see how the Joel and Ethan Coen’s movie about the same period, Inside Llewyn Davis, tracking the career of fictional folksinger of the same name, looks in its entirety:

Watching this trailer, I was particularly struck by Carey Mulligan’s character, who maybe is Davis’ girlfriend, current or former, but at minimum is a frustrated truth-teller who is acutely aware of Davis’s weaknesses. This clip reminded me of something Emily Nussbaum wrote earlier this year about “a time when the legendary wildness of male New York intellectuals and artists was made possible by middle-class girlfriends who paid the rent and absorbed hipness from the kitchen. As Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, observed in her scathing memoir Minor Characters, an account of kohl-eyed Barnard coeds fleeing to Greenwich Village, ‘Even a very young woman can achieve old-ladyhood, become the mainstay of someone else’s self-destructive genius.’”

Elizabeth Olsen is playing another character like this in Kill Your Darlings, the account of Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lucien Carr at Columbia, leading up to the period when Carr killed David Kammerer. She’s Edie Parker, who eventually married Jack Kerouac, also a character in the movie, for a brief period while he was imprisoned. And while she’s less angry than Mulligan’s character appears to be, she embodies the awfulness of standing by while people who think they’re geniuses self-indulge and self-destruct. It’s irritating to constantly put women in the position of having to be the in-text reminders to the audience that what male characters think is badass is not necessarily so. But better that, I suppose, than a straight-forward lionization of self-absorption. And at least Mulligan’s character gets to be an artist, too.

Last week, the news broke that Downton Abbey, the British drama about the titled residents of a major country estate and the people who work for them, will be adding its first black character: the London-born actor Gary Carr, who has a long British television resume, will play a jazz singer named Jack Ross. This is a notable development for Downton Abbey, which through three seasons has remained resolutely—if appropriate to its time period and setting—monochromatic. But the show’s decision is also part of a larger trend of overwhelmingly white shows that have made the decision to try to broaden their casting and their subject matter. And Downton Abbey can learn from Lena Dunham’s HBO comedy Girls, which responded to a firestorm of criticism over its whiteness by adding a character named Sandy (Donald Glover), a black Republican love interest for the main character, and AMC’s Mad Men, which in its sixth season has added two African-American characters and expanded its treatment of its characters reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Downton Abbey, Girls, and Mad Men all differ in the extent to which their settings made the absence of black characters conspicuous or uncomfortable. A relatively secluded English country estate, close to a small town rather than London, would be less likely to have black British or immigrant residents than the capital itself, particularly in 1912. Mad Men has somewhat less excuse than Downton Abbey does, and a number of analysts have suggested that the version of Madison Avenue series creator Matthew Weiner and his collaborators have presented on the show actually suggests that women and African-Americans had made less progress in the advertising industry than they really had, particularly at the firm BBDO. And Girls, which was maligned as racist for having four white main characters, did better than its harshest critics suggested and worse than might have been realistic. The show, set in contemporary Brooklyn, did give its main character Hannah Horvath (Dunham) an Asian coworker at the publishing house where she was a long-time intern, but also relied on stereotyped portrayals of non-white secretaries and nannies, and gave its privileged characters a small, monochromatic social circle. Whether or not that was realistic, or whether or not that was a wise choice on Dunham’s part was a matter of how alienating an individual viewer found the decision, and how much one believed that relatively privileged Oberlin graduates might only have close friends of their same race.

Whether or not Weiner or Dunham felt obligated to have their shows respond to their critics on race, they both did so in ways that made black characters on-screen critics of the white main characters. Dawn (Teyonah Parris), Don Draper’s secretary, who became Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first black employee in the first episode of the fifth season of Mad Men, told a friend she met for dinner this season of her white employers that “Everyone’s scared. Women crying in the ladies’ room. Men crying in the elevator. It’s like New Year’s Eve when they empty the garbage there. There’s so many bottles.” She spoke not just as an outsider to the office but for critics of Mad Men who have found the show alienating and offputting. And Sandy, after failing to finish one of Hannah’s essays on Girls, told her “It wasn’t for me.” When Hannah protested of the essay that “It’s for everyone,” the show was cleverly flipping the script. Sandy, the black character, was saying that a piece of art didn’t have to speak to everyone’s sensibilities, unlike critics of color of the show who were upset that it didn’t address their experiences, while it was Hannah, the white character, who was suggesting that Girls ought to be for everyone, contra many white critics’ defenses that the show’s strength lay in its particularity, and that it couldn’t possibly be reasonable to demand that it serve a universal function.
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The Black List, a list of the best unshot scripts of any given year, as picked by a group of almost 300 film executives, came out yesterday afternoon. Reading through it, I was struck by some trends—lots of scripts by guys, lots of bank robberies, lots of science fiction but almost almost no fantasy. But I was intrigued by a lot of the projects on the list, and these ten which most caught my eye are just a few of the scripts that seek out political resonance, or have settings like the Dust Bowl or Bleeding Kansas.

Script: Rodham
Author: Young Il Kim
Description: “During the height of the Watergate scandal, rising star Hillary Rodham is the youngest lawyer chosen for the House Judiciary Committee to Impeach Nixon, but she soon finds herself forced to choose between a destined path to the White House and her unresolved feelings for Bill Clinton, her former boyfriend who now teaches law in Arkansas.”
Why I’m Curious: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a fascinating figure. And people have asked for years why she chose to stay with Bill Clinton, it’s an intriguing question how she chose him, and life in Arkansas, in the first place. There are a lot of movies that attempt to capture election zeitgeists, and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to see Harvey Weinstein snap this one up for a 2016 release. But this is a smarter-than-usual way to approach a figure about whom so much has written that it seems like nothing new could be revealed.

Script: Story Of Your Life
Author: Eric Heisserer
Description: “Based on the short story by Ted Chiang. When alien crafts land around the world, a linguistics expert is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As she learns to communicate with the aliens, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit.”
Why I’m Curious: I’ve written about my obsessions with smart, alternative alien invasion scenarios over and over again. It’s been fifteen years since Contact, the last great movie about trying to talk to aliens instead of immediately going to war with them, and three years since District 9. We are long overdue.

Script: Shut In
Author: Christina Hodson
Description: “A woman who tries to raise her catatonic son on her own suddenly discovers a shocking secret about him.”
Why I’m Curious: Since Adam Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, before heading off to massacre students and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary, there’s been renewed attention to mothers raising difficult children by themselves face, and what kind of support we could give them. I’m curious to see a strong psychological portrait that examines those kinds of challenges.

Script: Man Of Tomorrow
Author: Jeremy Slater
Description: “In an alternate 1940s reality, the US Government makes a deal with an indestructible gangster to kill Hilter in exchange for the city of Chicago, which he will build into his own utopia. Unfortunately his model city never comes to fruition and both he and his Bureau liaison get much of the slack for destroying one of America’s greatest cities and now the government wants him dead.”
Why I’m Curious: Urban planning, alternate history, and killing Hitler? I’m so game.
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The Downton Abbey panel at the Television Critics Association press tour was a raucous spectacle, with Shirley MacLaine, who will be playing Lady Cora’s American mother, telling raucous stories about Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, who plays Lord Grantham, ripping open his dress shirt to reveal a “Free Bates” t-shirt, and Brendan Coyle declaring that in Downton personality tests, he comes up as a Lady Mary. But in the midst of all of it, Julian Fellowes, who created the show, offered one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of how to explore modern concerns in a period framework without becoming thunderously obvious or inappropriate to the period. He said:

There are many subjects that we sort of range among with I don’t know whether it’s women’s rights or homosexuality or whatever, which you wouldn’t find in a novel written in 1906 or whatever. And so you have that freedom. But the discipline is to look at those subjects, but within the context of that period. So you must be careful to try and give people reasonable reactions and emotional responses that are right for their own time and not simply someone who’s been parachuted in from 2012. And that’s the other discipline, really.

I think that’s exactly right, and gets at what’s interesting about period stories. On something like sexual orientation, I understand the impulse to look to history and period stories to demonstrate that people who have been attracted to people of their same gender have always existed. But what’s fascinating about seeing, say, Thomas, live out his life as a gay man in Edwardian England is not, that people had same-sex sexual contact in Edwardian England, but the differences between how he thinks of himself and his sexual and romantic feelings for men or the way the Duke of Crowborough conceives of his relationship with Thomas as separate from his identity, and the way we understand sexual orientation today. It’s the spaces between then and now that are interesting, the distance we’ve traveled, and the understanding that we’ll change again.

In terms of what to expect from season three of Downton Abbey, Fellowes and the cast were very cagey. But the trailer screened before the panel suggested a number of things. The family will face the decimation of Cora’s fortune, something that will change the dynamic between Cora and Robert will change because, as Fellowes said “Cora is less afraid of the future than Robert is. She’s much less afraid of change. And now you’ll start to see more and more of that because she’s less afraid of expressing that.” Mr. Bates remains incarcerated. A rift has come between Thomas and O’Brien, who we see sniping at each other. Lady Sybil and Branson are back from their elopement, something Fellowes suggests may be linked to the Irish Troubles. Branson’s proclivity for causing trouble at dinner doesn’t appear to have abated, though he’s doing it from his seat among the company rather than while standing in as a footman, and his elevation has Carson twitchy. And dear, silly Matthew and Mary are fighting about something big, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping their drive to the altar, or at least for Matthew to insinuate he’s pretty excited to get in Lady Mary’s knickers. I had my quibbles with the melodrama of this last season, but this is a fun, fizzy combination of plots, and I’m looking forward to see how it plays out.