The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

For much of the decade, Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live-action show on television. It altered the language and shifted comedic sensibilities, and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones. Yet if you missed an episode of Seinfeld, you simply missed it.

That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.

It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional.

It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

This erasure was seen as meaningful, as was the increasing likelihood that Generation X would be the only canonical demographic to never produce an American president.[*]