The Year the Monoculture Died

At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. DeGeneres’ Twitter account posted it immediately afterward, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time.

The selfie was an instantly viral moment in a telecast that drew the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people. The photo (for which Cooper used a phone made by Samsung, a major Oscars sponsor) became a dayslong news cycle unto itself.

No one knew it at the time, but in retrospect the selfie moment feels like the last stand of a shared popular culture that no longer exists. Monoculture didn’t die with Cooper’s selfie, but that night may have been its last peak.

The idea of a monoculture isn’t entirely a benevolent one, obviously — words like “gatekeeping” and “dumbing down” could be substituted for it. And nostalgia is by definition rose-colored. But in a fragmented world — politically, socially, algorithmically — where tech tools have the ability to make people question reality itself, and in an industry that is seeing one-time pillars of creativity reduced (at least potentially) to tiles on another company’s landing page, the idea of a widely shared pop cultural language feels almost romantic.

To rewind a bit: At the time of the Oscar selfie in 2014, social media was ascendant, and both traditional and online media outlets were reaping the benefits of an ecosystem where a favored Facebook post could generate tens of thousands of clicks (the “pivot to video” that would end all that was still a year away). Virality often came in the form of BuzzFeed or Upworthy posts with “What happened next will blow your mind” headlines, a style quickly copied all over the web. Live-tweeting sports (which were all on broadcast or cable TV), big news events or just an episode of American Idol was a way to have a real-time conversation with a few dozen (or a few thousand) of your friends and followers.

It wasn’t just the Oscars that were big that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets were arguably at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in almost 21 million. The Emmy Awards in August 2014 had 15.59 million viewers on NBC — down about 12 percent from 2013 but still a very healthy audience. Five other music awards shows that year brought in at least 10 million viewers.

Regular series thrived as well. In the 2013-14 TV season, two dozen network and cable shows, ranging from The Walking Dead to Downton Abbey, averaged 12 million or more viewers; the top two (The Big Bang Theory and NCIS) had more than 22 million each and even outdrew primetime NFL games after a week of DVR playback.

Streaming was also not really a thing yet. Netflix had made a splash in 2013 with its first original series, House of Cards, but most of the industry still considered it the “Albanian army,” as then Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes dismissively referred to the company in 2010. (Time Warner, incidentally, was still a few years away from its merger with AT&T, which started the cascade that eventually led to its impending engulfment by Paramount Skydance.) When the Oscars aired on March 2, 2014, a total of 14 original streaming shows existed on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon’s Prime Video.

Heck, even the idea of the selfie was still relatively new at the time. The term had been around since the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until Apple installed a front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 in 2010 that they really took off. Facebook had acquired the then two-year-old Instagram, already a repository of millions of selfies, in 2012 but was at least nominally keeping to its pledge to let the app grow on its own. The Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year for 2013, about four months before the Oscars moment.

The fracturing of pop culture didn’t happen all at once, of course. The back half of the 2010s had a number of shared touchstones — from the nearly $5 billion worldwide box office of the last two Avengers movies to huge audiences for Game of Thrones‘ final seasons and stratospheric sales figures for music artists like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Adele. But cracks in the monolith were clearly showing.

If awards shows are a proxy for what people — both the folks who make the things nominated for awards and the public that consumes them — are dialed in on at any given time, then our collective attention has steadily waned over time. None of the big awards telecasts has approached its 2014 audience numbers in the 12 years since. The Oscar broadcast is still usually the biggest non-sports primetime show of the year on a broadcast network, but that now means 18 million or so viewers rather than 40 million-plus. The Grammys (14.41 million viewers in 2026) and other awards shows have similarly fallen off.

Traditional TV audiences have splintered as well. Today, you can find a few network shows that, thanks largely to streaming, could compete with audience totals from 12 years ago. But where there were 24 network and cable shows then with 12 million or more viewers over seven days, now there are just three (CBS’ Marshals and Tracker and ABC’s High Potential).

The explosion of choices made possible by streaming (of both filmed media and music) has made it less and less likely that a huge group of people are watching or listening to the same things at the same time. Netflix’s rapid growth into a major player — it released more than 60 English language scripted series in 2019 (and many more unscripted shows, documentaries and imports) — was a spark that led some cable and satellite subscribers to cut the cord, which in turn led traditional media giants like Disney, Time Warner and NBCUniversal to turn away from their still profitable (but less so than a decade earlier) linear TV business.

Then-Disney CEO Bob Iger signaled the start of a streaming arms race to catch up with Netflix in August 2017, when he announced an “extremely important strategic shift” at the company toward developing what would become Disney+ and ESPN’s first streaming offering.

Disney+ and Apple TV+ launched in 2019. HBO Max and Peacock followed in 2020, all while Hulu, Prime Video and CBS All Access — which would become Paramount+ in 2021 — were also scaling up. In 2019, 532 English language scripted series aired or streamed in the United States, per FX’s annual count, which was then an all-time high.

Then the 2020s began with a pandemic that really caused monoculture to crumble. As people spent months or longer away from shared spaces, shared experiences went way down too — at least of the kind experienced outside our mobile devices. Season three of Ozark and the rubbernecking spectacle that was Tiger King both launched on Netflix just as lockdowns were taking hold, and they were huge.

But with hundreds of film and TV productions also shut down for extended times, YouTube, TikTok and other social media began to soak up much more of people’s media time, and no one’s algorithm necessarily served up the same content as anyone else’s. That’s by design, of course — content that’s personalized, or at least feels that way, is what keeps us glued to our handheld screens or, increasingly, letting the “play next” ticker serve up another YouTube video on our TVs.

Scrolling, or the passive bigger screen version of it, has become the have-it-on-in-the-background programming of choice at the expense of, say, daytime soap operas and talk shows, whose numbers have dwindled in the past decade along with a drop in audience.

Pinpointing a time when shared culture started to give way is obviously an exercise in hindsight. Just as obvious, there are still some huge collective experiences in the current era — Super Bowls, the Eras Tour, the end of Stranger Things, even something like Project Hail Mary’s unexpectedly strong run at the box office.

Hindsight can be powerful, though — the adage about not remembering the past and being condemned to repeat it holds some truth, after all. The notion of shared pop culture as common language might seem like it’s in the rearview mirror now, or someone else might write an essay in 2038 looking back at how much more unified things were a decade-plus earlier.