Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: January 21, 2011
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Portlandia, “Farm” (Season 1, Episode 1) [Watch on Netflix].
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: There’s a lot of talk about this being a golden age of television, and while that usually pertains to the giant umbrella of all television, it’s also true about a lot of smaller categorizations of TV. For one thing, we’re definitely in a golden age for TV sketch comedy. Once solely the province of Saturday Night Live — with a brief challenge by MadTV and occasional indie upstarts like The Ben Stiller Show and Mister Show — comedy fans now have some great options when it comes to sketch comedy on TV, thanks to the successes of shows like Key & Peele and Inside Amy Schumer. Certainly one show that helped open those doors and broaden the current TV landscape for sketch was Portlandia, which made its debut on IFC five years ago today.
Created by and starring SNL alum Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney band member Carrie Brownstein, Portlandia kicked off with the simple premise of satirizing the kind of hipster culture that had become more and more prominent among young people. Defining Portland the way movies like Singles defined grunge-era Seattle, Portlandia entered the world via a mission statement that tied those two eras together:
Purely satirizing hipster culture would have been a fairly limiting goal, though; Portlandia managed to stay as fresh and funny as it was by quickly opening itself up to the kinds of way-we-live-now sketches that went beyond pickle-farming. The weirder the show got, the more specifically targeted its sketches became, the funnier it was.
The best Portlandia sketches manage to touch on aspects of modern life that you didn’t even realize were a thing yet. No, they didn’t invent binge-watching as a concept, but they were among the first to satirize it and an increasingly dominant aspect of our pop culture consumtpion, in this brilliant Battlestar Galactica sketch:
