The Guide is 200 issues old today \u2013 maybe not the biggest milestone, but one worth marking. So this week we\u2019re doing just that, ending our recent miniseries on the culture of the past 25 years with a listicle spectacular.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve picked a piece of popular culture for each year of the 21st century so far. Which isn\u2019t to say a definitive list of the best culture of the 21st century \u2013 the Guardian\u2019s arts desk already did that far more conclusively<\/a> than we ever could. Instead, we\u2019ve selected 21st-century TV shows, films, plays, podcasts, artworks, albums and games that together hopefully help explain how culture has evolved in that time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a hefty list, so there\u2019s no room for our regulars this week, but at least a few of these will serve as recommendations. Normal service will return next week. Anyway, on with the list!<\/p>\n Craig Phillips outside the Big Brother house after winning the first series. Photograph: Ferran Paredes\/Reuters<\/p>\n 2000 | Big Brother<\/p>\n Channel 4, what hast thou wrought! Reality TV has loomed over pop culture<\/a> for the past 25 years, and Big Brother\u2019s DNA can be found in every last Real Housewife or Love Islander. But, as bad as some of the TV that followed in its wake was, BB was \u2013 in its first outing at least \u2013 a genuinely radical social experiment. And great drama too, not least when Nasty Nick broke bad midway through the series.<\/p>\n Also this year: Radiohead\u2019s Kid A banishes guitars \u2013 and revitalises rock music; The Sims allows gamers to play God in both mundane and thrilling ways.<\/p>\n 2001 | A Stroke of Genius<\/p>\n The Guardian declared this mashup of Hard to Explain and Christina Aguilera\u2019s Genie in a Bottle the song that defined the 2000s<\/a>, and 15 years later, it still feels predictive. Witness the way that someone like PinkPantheress inserts whole choruses from other songs into her thoroughly modern dance-pop \u2013 or head to YouTube, where you can find thousands of similarly inventive cut-and-shunts<\/a>.<\/p>\n Also this year: the gorgeous Spirited Away kicks off Ghibli-mania in the west; Jeremy Deller re-enacts The Battle of Orgreave in a giant piece of participatory art.<\/p>\n 2002 | Russian Ark<\/p>\n Niche it may be, but Aleksandr Sokurov\u2019s film \u2013 which traces the modern history of Russia through the halls of St Petersburg\u2019s Hermitage Museum \u2013 was also the first pebble that started an avalanche. Its single-take conceit, fresh in 2002, has since become the go-to cinematic trick shot for show-off directors, seen everywhere from bloody war sagas to Oscar-winning navel-gazes. But unlike many of those films, Russian Ark was authentically, mind-blowingly shot in one uninterrupted take.<\/p>\n Also this year: Martin McDonagh\u2019s The Lieutenant of Inishmore brings Tarantino-level violence to the West End; The Wire debuts and makes the TV show novelistic.<\/p>\n 2003 | The Weather Project<\/p>\n Since it opened in 2000, Tate Modern has upended<\/a> the British public\u2019s once wary relationship with contemporary art. None of its installations better demonstrates that than the giant, beaming \u201csun\u201d installed by Olafur Eliasson in the Turbine Hall, which visitors thronged to gawp at en masse. An \u201calmost psychotropic transformation of human social behaviour\u201d was how Jonathan Jones described<\/a> the public\u2019s gaga response at the time.<\/p>\n Also this year: graphic novel Persepolis is the first of many great artworks about Iran this century; the White Stripes release Seven Nation Army, a track that first takes over indie dancefloors \u2013 and then moves on to the football terraces.<\/p>\n 2004 | World of Warcraft<\/p>\n The massively multiplayer online role-playing game had been around for years before Blizzard Entertainment entered the fray, but this fantasy steampunk adventure soon dominated the scene. Effectively an online version of Dungeons and Dragons, it allowed players to create warriors, join clans and fight monsters as a team \u2013 and that\u2019s pretty much what they\u2019re still doing 20 years later. With an estimated 7.5 million players, the virtual world of Azeroth has a larger population than Denmark. Picked by Keith Stuart, Guardian games correspondent<\/p>\n Also this year: Matt Stone and Trey Parker puncture liberal pieties with puppets in Team America; Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor reinvent shiny-floored Saturday evening TV.<\/p>\n 2005 | Never Let Me Go<\/p>\n Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s poignant, sci-fi-tinged novel is emblematic of the collision of pop fiction and literary fiction that seemed to accelerate in the 21st century, as serious authors like Colson Whitehead or Emily St John Mandel dabbled effortlessly in genre. But more than that, Never Let Me Go is a novel that has been held close by a generation of readers enchanted \u2013 and devastated \u2013 by its raw coming-of-age tale.<\/p>\n Also this year: Stewart Lee ushers in the age of deconstructed standup with 90s Comedian; Gay cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain has audiences weeping in the cinema aisles \u2013 and again a year later, when it loses out on the best picture Oscar to the abysmal Crash.<\/p>\n 2006 | Back to Black<\/p>\n A mark of how good<\/a> Amy Winehouse\u2019s second album was \u2013 and still is \u2013 is that it remains enlivening to listen to even while its lyrics attest to \u2013 and predict \u2013perhaps the bleakest celebrity rise and fall story of the past 25 years. Back to Black\u2019s merging together of classic Motown soul and contemporary, deeply personal lyrics has influenced a generation of songwriters, and set Mark Ronson on the path to being the key producer of the 21st century \u2013 but the absence of the superstar at its centre is still painfully felt.<\/p>\n Also this year: Planet Earth changes the game for nature documentaries; the Nintendo Wii brings a new dimension to gaming with its motion controller \u2013 leading to plenty of smashed tellies.<\/p>\n 2007 | Punchdrunk: The Masque of the Red Death<\/p>\n Punchdrunk\u2019s pawprints are all over theatre this century: immersive experiences litter the West End, and audiences have grown used to finding themselves, sometimes unwillingly, part of the play. Any number of Punchdrunk productions could slot neatly into this list, but this one, a bacchanalian adaptation of Poe\u2019s short stories made in collaboration with the Battersea Arts Centre gets the nod as the Guardian critics\u2019 favourite Punchdrunk production of the 21st century.<\/p>\n Also this year: The Sopranos finale cuts to black, raising the bar for TV endings; the haunted dubstep of Burial\u2019s Untrue inspires endless downbeat dance imitators.<\/p>\n 2008 | The Dark Knight<\/p>\n This was the year the soon-to-be-dominant superhero movie genre split off in two distinct directions: on one path, there was the shiny, quippy planet-smashing of Marvel\u2019s Iron Man; the other, the darkness \u2013 in both look and outlook \u2013 of Christopher Nolan\u2019s landmark second Batman film. That Dark Knight would inspire numerous less talented film-makers to make a succession of gloomy, self-serious superhero movies shouldn\u2019t count against what is still arguably the best superhero movie of this era. Nolan, of course, would go on to parlay its success into a series of mad, ambitious original blockbusters.<\/p>\n Also this year: groundbreaking doc 102 Minutes That Changed America tells the story of 9\/11 through a collage of amateur footage, anticipating the YouTube age; The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is translated, bringing Scandi-noir to our shores.<\/p>\n 2009 | Parks and Recreation<\/p>\n The mockumentary has become comedy\u2019s default mode in the 21st century: if you want to make a workplace sitcom (in a school<\/a> or a hospital<\/a>, say), you had to pretend it\u2019s a documentary, for some strange reason. 2009 was when this informal rule was established: this year The Office US enjoyed its highest ratings, and Modern Family debuted to enormous viewing figures. Better than both though \u2013 if not as popular \u2013 was Michael Schur\u2019s lovely local government mockumentary, which would shake off the cynicism of 00s comedy to become the first in a wave of \u201cnice\u201d 2010s sitcoms (The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine).<\/p>\n Also this year: Sandbox game Minecraft inspires a generation of \u201cchicken jockey<\/a>\u201d-screeching coders; Jez Butterworth\u2019s \u201cplay of the century<\/a>\u201d Jerusalem diagnoses Broken Britain.<\/p>\n Robyn at The Warfield in 2010, San Francisco, California. Photograph: Tim Mosenfelder\/Getty<\/p>\n 2010 | Robyn: Body Talk<\/p>\n Giving the world Dancing on My Own and Call Your Girlfriend \u2013 the \u201ccrying-while-dancing\u201d ur-texts \u2013 would alone be enough to secure a place on this list. But the institutional ripple effects of Body Talk are still being felt, too. It set the template for the heights an emancipated pop star could reach. Independence from a major label allowed the Swede to pursue an auteurist strain of pop that has since become the norm \u2013 think Charli xcx et al \u2013 and Body Talk\u2019s unerring quality brought a generation of indie snobs in from the cold, becoming a poptimist set text. Picked by Laura Snapes, Guardian deputy music editor<\/p>\n Also this year: Christian Marclay\u2019s video artwork The Clock creates a 24-hour timepiece out of film footage; The Great British Bake Off cooks up a cosier, kinder form of reality TV.<\/p>\n 2011 | White House correspondents\u2019 dinner<\/p>\n Were these the most consequential gags of the 21st century? Many have pinpointed the flurry of digs aimed \u2013 first by Barack Obama, then comedian Seth Meyers \u2013 at a glowering Donald Trump, at this event as the inciting incident in persuading Trump to run for president<\/a> and stick it to the elites that had laughed at him. Perhaps we shouldn\u2019t look back on it too fondly then \u2013 though the gags still hold up: \u201cDonald Trump often appears on Fox, which is ironic because a fox often appears on Donald Trump\u2019s head,\u201d deadpanned Meyers as Trump\u2019s vulpine \u2018do quivered angrily in the audience.<\/p>\n Also this year: Game of Thrones lops off its hero\u2019s head, changing genre TV for ever; One Man, Two Guvnors ushers in the age of James Corden.<\/p>\n 2012 | The Visitors<\/p>\n In a grand, dilapidated mansion in upstate New York, nine Icelandic musicians (including the artist, playing the guitar in the bath) extemporise a gently melancholic song for more than an hour. So why is this nine-screen film installation so compelling? Named after Abba\u2019s then-final LP, The Visitors captures the wistful end of youth, the sadness at the conclusion of a marriage, and the fragile optimism of liberal America (Obama had just been re-elected). It\u2019s as gorgeous as the last golden hour of summer. Picked by Alex Needham, Guardian arts editor<\/p>\n Also this year: Psy\u2019s Gangnam Style complete with preposterous horsey dance becomes the biggest viral hit of the decade; Danny Boyle wows the world with the London 2012 opening ceremony. (Props for smuggling Fuck Buttons<\/a> in there, Danny.)<\/p>\n 2013 | Breaking Bad: Ozymandias<\/p>\n The breathless Ozymandias has a decent claim to be the best episode of TV\u2019s golden age, but its significance is even bigger than that: it helped set Netflix on the path to replacing TV<\/a>. This was the year that the streaming service first became indispensable \u2013 thanks in part to a series of buzzy originals (House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, the Arrested Development reboot), sure. But many of us signed up that year purely to watch every horribly tense moment of Breaking Bad\u2019s final season.<\/p>\n Also this year: Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s self-titled fifth LP popularises two 21st-century trends \u2013 the visual album and the surprise release; Grand Theft Auto V pushes gaming to new heights (hurry up with the sequel, Rockstar!).<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sarah Koenig with her microphone at the court in Baltimore as the judge overturns Adnan Syed\u2019s conviction on 19 September 2022. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst\/Reuters<\/p>\n 2014 | Serial<\/p>\n Podcasts had existed for a decade before Sarah Koenig called Adnan Syed on his prison payphone and pressed record, but Serial was the breakout moment for the medium, not to mention that of true crime: a year later Making a Murderer and The Jinx would premiere, and today every streaming service or podcast platform hoping to turn a profit has to have at least one salacious crime doc on its books. Vanishingly few, though, are as compassionate, thoughtful or just plain good as Koenig\u2019s.<\/p>\n Also this year: Richard Linklater\u2019s mesmerising Boyhood is like a coming-of-age drama meets nature-doc time-lapse footage; Happy Valley brings noir drama to Hebden Bridge \u2013 complete with shockingly un-BBC levels of violence.<\/p>\n 2015 | Hamilton<\/p>\n The words \u201crap battle musical about America\u2019s founding fathers\u201d should by rights send a shiver down the spine of any right-thinking person \u2026 which makes Hamilton\u2019s success all the more remarkable. A key moment in the re-emergence of the Broadway musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s hymn to disagreeing agreeably also felt perfectly timed for Trump\u2019s first reign. A decade and endless stagings around the world later, few recent productions can be considered as influential<\/a>.<\/p>\n Also this year: Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019s Between the World and Me is an electrifying memoir for the BLM era; Kendrick Lamar\u2019s dizzying, righteous To Pimp a Butterfly plays a similar role for the album.<\/p>\n 2016 | Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/p>\n Created by innovative American studio Niantic, a specialist in augmented reality mobile phone games, Pok\u00e9mon Go set Nintendo\u2019s legendary monster collecting adventure free from consoles and thrust it into the real world. Suddenly, the likes of Pikachu and Jigglypuff could be located in your garden, local town centre or on holiday, and you could team up with pals and strangers to find them. An incredible experiment in location-based entertainment, sending millions of fans out into the sunshine. Keith Stuart<\/p>\n Also this year: Barry Jenkins\u2019 beautiful Oscar winner Moonlight announces the arrival of hipster studio A24; The Crown turns the lives of the Windsors into luscious, gourmet TV.<\/p>\n 2017 | Get Out<\/p>\n Nearly a decade on, the decision not to give Jordan Peele\u2019s timely race relations horror satire the best picture Oscar seems even more glaring than it did at the time. But no matter: its influence has been felt elsewhere, with it teaching a generation of directors (Ari Aster, Robert Eggers et al) that horror \u2013 far from a constrictive and formulaic genre \u2013 could be a blank canvas on which to splatter their wildest, goriest ideas.<\/p>\n Also this year: David Lynch breaks the rules of TV \u2013 again! \u2013 with Twin Peaks revival The Return; Stormzy takes grime to No 1 with debut album Gangs Signs & Prayer.<\/p>\n 2018 | Normal People<\/p>\n Marianne and Connell\u2019s will-they-won\u2019t-they romance took a generation by storm, earning Sally Rooney the title of<\/a> \u201cthe first great millennial author\u201d. Set in mid-2010s Ireland, Normal People captured the post-2008 crash anxieties of the era, looking at the possibilities of love under contemporary capitalism. It also put the Sad Girl Novel on the map, with books like Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Naoise Dolan\u2019s Exciting Times and Megan Nolan\u2019s Acts of Desperation riding the wave. Picked by Ella Creamer, who writes the Guardian\u2019s Bookmarks newsletter<\/p>\n Also this year: Red Dead Redemption 2 takes the open-world sandbox game to eye-popping new heights; Succession debuts and everyone says they can\u2019t stomach watching such horrible people \u2026 then do exactly that for four seasons.<\/p>\n 2019 | Blinding Lights<\/p>\n One of the many ways Spotify has changed music is in how we quantify a hit: where once we counted in millions, we now consider billions the benchmark. Blinding Lights, The Weeknd\u2019s synth-pop tingler, is the most listened-to song on Spotify with 3.9bn streams. A scarcely fathomable number \u2013 it would take more than 27,000 years to listen to those streams one-by-one \u2013 but also sort of small: Spotify\u2019s only less than two decades old, after all. What sort of streaming numbers will be the benchmark when we\u2019re halfway through this century: hundreds of billions? Trillions?<\/p>\n Also this year: Bong Joon-ho\u2019s brilliant Parasite breaks down the one-inch barrier of subtitles<\/a>; a brilliant Nan Goldin retrospective hits London \u2013 right as Goldin is tearing up the art world with her protests against opioid scions (and major art benefactors), the Sackler family.<\/p>\n Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You. Photograph: Landmark Media\/Alamy<\/p>\n 2020 | I May Destroy You<\/p>\n It feels like Michaela Coel\u2019s one-series wonder has been memory-holed in recent years, the result perhaps of landing smack bang in the middle of that fuzzy, time-bending Covid era. Harsh, as IMDY was and remains a major piece of work. The culmination of a decade\u2019s-worth of auteurist comedy-dramas often mislabelled as sadcoms (Girls, Master of None, Fleabag), it stretched that mini-genre into unpredictable new shapes<\/a>, reckoning with sexual assault, racism, representation, financial precarity and everything else under the sun in its restless, experimental 12 episodes.<\/p>\n Also this year: Fiona Apple\u2019s singular Fetch the Bolt Cutters manages a perfect 10 on Pitchfork<\/a>; Hilary Mantel completes her Thomas Cromwell trilogy \u2013 and the final book of her lifetime \u2013 with The Mirror and the Light.<\/p>\n 2021 | Bo Burnham: Inside<\/p>\n This was released at the peak of the \u201clockdown art\u201d era, where creative types with nowhere to go made ambitious work in their own front rooms. No one pushed that idea further than Burnham, who holed himself up in his LA guest room for a year devising a musical comedy spectacular that doubled up as a meditation on lockdown loneliness. Was it even standup comedy? No one was sure, but its invention sure put the frighteners up other comics: James Acaster said it made him want to quit comedy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Also this year: gruesome TV megasmash Squid Game caps a period of Korean cultural dominance; Rebecca Frecknall\u2019s Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club marked the return of theatre post-Covid, with celebrity (Jessie Buckley, Eddie Redmayne) and cocktails.<\/p>\n 2022 | Top Gun: Maverick<\/p>\n Barbenheimer might get most of the plaudits for coaxing audiences back after Covid, but it was Tom Cruise and his F-14 that really bailed cinema out at its lowest point, with a blockbuster that demanded to be seen on the big screen, then sent audiences out of multiplexes high on the heady fumes of nostalgia. Released just weeks shy of Cruise\u2019s 60th birthday, Maverick also underscored that action cinema had become a country for old-ish men: see also Brad Pitt in this year\u2019s F1.<\/p>\n Also this year: Severance, a puzzle-box mystery tailor-made for the Reddit age, debuts on Apple TV+; the gaming world is bowled over by Elden Ring, a jaw-droppingly vivid fantasy adventure.<\/p>\n A Swiftie takes a photograph at the Swiftie Steps and murals at Wembley Park, north west London. Photograph: Yui Mok\/PA<\/p>\n 2023 | The Eras tour<\/p>\n More than 10 million attended across 149 dates, with $2bn raised in ticket sales \u2013 plus who knows how much more from a coordinated merch onslaught \u2026 This was the tour that obliterated all tours, confirming Taylor Swift\u2019s place as the biggest artist of her age, and maybe any age. But it was also the crowning moment of a post-pandemic communion, as people all across the world returned giddily to gigging.<\/p>\n Also this year: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom became a true crossover event, with even casual gamers entranced by its imagination and humour; Steve McQueen\u2019s haunting video art piece Grenfell uses drones to silently bear witness to a British scandal.<\/p>\n 2024 | All Fours<\/p>\n If autofiction was one of the big literary trends of this century \u2013 with novelists suddenly choosing to use their own life stories rather than making things up<\/a> \u2013 Miranda July was the movement\u2019s megastar. All Fours, her account of a perimenopausal woman\u2019s sexual awakening, inspired as Zoe Williams put it in her interview with July<\/a>, \u201cthe sort of mania last experienced when the final Twilight book dropped, except this time for women in midlife rather than teenage girls\u201d. A true cultural phenomenon.<\/p>\n Also this year: Richard Gadd turns his Baby Reindeer fringe show into a remarkably revealing \u2013 if ethically murky \u2013 Netflix hit; Cindy Lee\u2019s haunted alt-pop album Diamond Jubilee is an old school word-of-mouth hit \u2026 that you can\u2019t find on Spotify.<\/p>\n 2025 | ?????<\/p>\n With half a year still to go, it would be a bit premature to pencil in a name here, but we\u2019re certainly not short of contenders, from Adolescence to Sinners or the Oasis reunion tour. Let\u2019s check back at the end of the year, shall we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Guide is 200 issues old today \u2013 maybe not the biggest milestone, but one worth marking. 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