Random thought about suspension of disbelief

I think the general audience for fiction, judging by current pop culture, is developing a more resilient suspension of disbelief. This occurred to me as I watched the last episode of Flashforward.  Now several years ago, a series like that would place the universe changing event at some (probably indeterminate) point in the future.  Major disaster movies avoided explicit references to dates because of the fear, probably justified, that if someone saw last month's newspaper on the set of...