Turn of the Millennium

The Year 2000. Flying cars, androids, faster-than-light space travel... oh wait, we don't have any of that yet. On the plus side, our computers didn't explode, after all. While New Years' 2000 came in with a bang, attitudes from The '90s pretty much lingered for the first year. For the United States (and arguably, to a lesser extent, the world), the decade politically started on September 11th, 2001 with the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., which not only launched the United States into two wars, but continues to be a lingering specter in global politics. It is possible this decade may have ended politically in late 2008, which saw the start of the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression, followed two months later by the election of Barack Obama as President. Culturally, the decade kicked off somewhere between 2000 to 2002 with the continued rise of the internet, online music downloads, and reality shows. It ended somewhere around 2010 with the rising prominence of the smartphone and social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook becoming very popular, and depending on who you ask, may have officially ended around 2012, when "memes" made their way to solid popular culture status. Either way, the transitional period was around 2008-2012.

See The War on Terror for the major wars of this decade. Note that, since The War on Terror has defined American and NATO-sphere foreign policy for almost all of this time, this decade has marked the arrival of Middle Eastern civilizations as societies to know about. For example, the Persian Gulf city of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, went through its boom during this decade.

The decade was a hard one for the United States, whose population suffered from, in quick succession: a controversial presidential election where the winner didn't win the popular vote, but did win in the electoral college; the worst terrorist attack in recorded history with a death toll of 2,977 (excluding the 19 perpetrators of the attack); the Patriot Act undermining civil liberties; two somewhat unpopular wars (one of which was started on what turned out to be Blatant Lies); the worst electrical blackout in American history; the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the second in American history and the beginning of the end of the country's manned space program; another controversial presidential election; the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans thanks to Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federal government to properly respond to said flooding; a surge in both aforementioned wars as it became very clear that things were not going as planned; the gradual transformation from the largest government budget surplus in American history, to the largest government budget deficit in American history; and the start of the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression, with millions of Americans unemployed and many more struggling at the decade's end. This resulted in the rise of Neo-Conservative interventionist politics, which led to those two somewhat unpopular foreign wars, and the strengthening of 'The Special Relationship' with Britain - where Clinton and British PM John Major had disliked each other, first Clinton, then Bush, got on very well with the charming Tony Blair, who despite being leader of the traditionally left wing Labour party, shared a similarly interventionist outlook, one only bolstered by a successful intervention in Sierra Leone in 1999.

There were also issues which stretched out for roughly the entire decade, such as the worst gas crisis since The '70s, with gas prices quadrupling from 2000 to 2008; skyrocketing income inequality; a crisis over the increasingly large wave of illegal immigrants crossing the border; a continued trend of worse education performances compared to much of the rest of the developed world; the dollar losing value compared to other currencies along with other signs of the US losing its global economic power; and widespread polarization over issues such as global warming, gay rights, religion, health and obesity, and other issues. This naturally lead to growing feelings of cynicism and insecurity, which is reflected in the growing trend towards Darker and Edgier entertainment.

Of course, on the other side of the coin, a lot of the decade's entertainment instead went in the direction of escapism. Much of the decade's culture can roughly be described as a retread of either The '80s or The '50s, depending on who you ask^note  It could technically be considered both, since The '80s itself is often considered a retread of The '50s. As if overcompensating for the insecurity they now felt, the American public took comfort in materialism and conspicuous consumption. The "McMansion" became the dominant paradigm for new homes, and enormous SUVs, after getting their start in the late '90s, came to rule over the car market, despite oil concerns, and forget electric cars. Seriously, forget they ever existed and buy an SUV. It wasn't until 2011 and the debut of the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf that electric cars would return to the roads. The tax breaks that, under Clinton, would've gone to electrics, now under Bush went to the heaviest cars, and the SUVs of this decade were certainly heavy cars.

Darker and Edgier became the norm in music aimed at teens, as muic and culture took a turn for the gothic and macarbe with a shift from squeaky-clean teen idols to Pop punk, emo, and Post-Hardcore bands such as Good Charlotte, Simple Plan and Jimmy Eat World in the early part of the decade. This genre exploded in 2005 with the rise of Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, AFI and similar acts, all of whom shared a focus on lyrics about serious topics such as mental and physical illness, sexual infidelity, and America's unhealthy obsession with tabloid stars. The subculture associated with the genre, known as emo, took high schools by storm with its sideswept bangs, skinny jeans, and heavy eye makeup. Ultimately it became one of the defining alternative rock genres of the decade with literally everyone having memories of listening to those bands in middle and high school. However just as the genre was reaching the peak of its popularity in 2008, Fall Out Boy's Folie à Deux showed a drastic shift in the band's sound and was met with mediocre commercial success, which started a chain reaction. By 2009, pop-punk and emo began its fall from the mainstream thanks to several factors: bands drastically changing their sound, breaking up, or going on hiatus; oversaturation by an endless string of one-hit wonders; creation and heavy promotion of manufactured bands like The Jonas Brothers by Disney and Nickelodeon as wholesome substitutes for authentic emo bands (resulting in the genre as a whole being branded as immature tween fodder); and the replacement of "emo" as popular music with electronic pop and as a culture with the "scene" trend - basically emo with lots of '80s-inspired big hair, makeup, neon, and Hello Kitty accessories.

In terms of the mainstream fashions, the early years had elements of 90's fashion which began to be replaced in 2004 and 05' were transitioning years, with the 90's officially out of style musically and culturally with skinny jeans and tighter clothes rapidly displacing bagginess In contrast to the grungy look of 90's fashion, 2000's fashion was more aestheticised, with beards replaced by clean shaven looks and darker make up on everyone (including some guys due to the rising influence of emo and skate culture).

Media technology continued to evolve. CD gave way to MP3 in the music sphere. DVD put VHS out of business early in the decade, only to have Blu-ray and HD-DVD, in a re-enactment of The '80s VHS vs Betamax debate, battle it out over who got to replace DVD at the end of the decade. Blu-Ray won, but instead of replacing DVD the two instead co-existed, perhaps due to the economic downturn.

The Blockbuster Age of Hollywood reached previously inconceivable heights - pretty much every year at least two movies would gross over $750 million and, by the end of the decade, at least one each year would surpass the billion dollar mark. In 2002, for the first time, a movie made more than $100 million just on its opening weekend. Thanks to new computer technology, most of these were incredibly expensive, CGI-packed extravaganzas, with superhero movies (like Spider-Man and The Dark Knight) and fantasy epics (such as theThe Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter series and the Pirates of the Caribbean series) being the dominant genres in terms of box office success. Much of the reason why studios began to concentrate so hard on these types of movies was to keep drawing in an audience despite the advent of digital piracy during this decade; if there was so much stuff on screen, the experience would be lost if it wasn't seen on a big screen. Pretty similar to how studios in The '50s tried to keep audiences away from television with 3-D and widescreen, really. Thanks to the size and scope of these films, smaller movies like comedies and romances lost their box office power, with some major figures in the movie world wondering if soon cinema would be entirely dominated by these colossal spectacles and people would lose interest in more down-to-earth movies. However, digital piracy, Netflix, and movie websites such as Rotten Tomatoes have brought attention to indie movies and foreign films which many people wouldn't have previously discovered, even if this didn't help these movies make a profit in theaters. Well, with one major exception - the martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the first foreign-language movie to gross over $100 million in the United States.

Reality took over TV, with Survivor and American Idol in the US and Big Brother and Pop Idol/The X Factor in Britain launching hundreds of imitators across an ocean of reality TV subgenres, helped along by the explosion of cable and satellite television as a major outlet for original programming. Celebrity came to be defined not by an entertainer's accomplishments as a musician, actor, athlete, etc., but by the number of paparazzi following his or her every move and the amount of tabloid press that he or she had. It was something that could be achieved for seemingly nebulous reasons, as shown by the inexplicable rise to superstardom of such people as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, who built media empires on their status as socialites and reality TV stars. The societal implications of this were not lost on the world, with Charlie Brooker in Britain, The Chaser's War on Everything in Australia, and The Soup and The Daily Show in the US leading a wave of shows and blogs that satirized and parodied the decade's culture.

Speaking of blogs, this was also the time in which the internet really became a part of society at large, instead of being limited to computer geeks and Usenet groups. Everyone got connected, with many people owning media storage devices, having access to the internet, etc. If you didn't have a computer with internet access, you were left behind. Technology was always getting better and less expensive via Moore's law, and you could walk into a department store and buy a computer which was at least a million times more powerful than the ones that put man on the moon. Video games finally started to gain mainstream recognition, especially near the end of the decade, with the release of the Wii. Games became Darker and Edgier, with much more mature storylines and realistic plots, although how mature and realistic they are is subject to debate (some see it as a repeat of The Dark Age of Comic Books). Meanwhile, the sports gaming industry was effectively monopolized by Electronic Arts.

Gaming's turn towards realism was reflected in speculative fiction. There was a great demand for more "realistic" depictions of what happens if we were to actually meet aliens or fight robots. If we are higher tech, there is a good chance that Humans Are the Real Monsters, and when we have the inferior tech, don't expect to come out of the situation alive or overcoming against bad odds. This shift is perhaps best exemplified by Lost and Battlestar Galactica, two of the defining sci-fi shows of the decade, which were both heavily focused on character-driven drama, philosophy, and gritty realism (the latter especially in BSG's case).

A lot of humor consisted of Crossing the Line Twice, and things which would have caused the Moral Guardians to have strokes just a few years earlier were seen as just mildly offensive. As such, an obsession with Japan and awareness of East Asian affairs (especially with China's rapid rise as a world power) became popular in the US once more. Movies tended to be more about adventure and self discovery than action and blowing things up. Of course, when you consider what started the decade off, it's kind of understandable why. Conversely, the September 11 attacks served as a horrifically crippling blow to America's psyche, causing one of the longest (and most infamous) Too Soon periods. People had become highly sensitive to concepts such as pyrotechnical violence, the destruction of skyscrapers, and terrorism, leading to the censoring and/or banning of a lot of past media that fell in bad taste in the wake of the attacks. The live action TV drama Fringe can be credited with ending this period via a twist-ending season finale where one of the main characters winds up in a parallel universe, in which the White House was destroyed on 9/11 instead of the World Trade Center. September 11 still remains a sensitive subject in media today, with most references to it being for serious or dramatic purposes.

Note that this was only named as such because few can decide on what to call the 2000-2009 period. In Britain and Australia, this decade is often called the Noughties, as the word "nought" is another word for "zero" (which some Brits might sourly note was roughly how much of what Tony Blair said was true). However, the word "nought" has faded from American English, which means that, to American ears, the term "Noughties" sounds like the more snicker-inducing "Naughties." ^note Ironically enough, this term was coined by some Americans in the late 1990s, who did indeed use the "Naughties" spelling, as it symbolized both the aforementioned zeroes and the hope that this decade would be less inhibited than The '90s. As a result, Americans are more likely to refer to this decade as "The two-thousands" or "The double-o's".

See Also: The Gay '90s, The Edwardian Era, The Roaring '20s, The Great Depression, The '40s, The '50s, The '60s, The '80s, The '90s and The New '10s.

Now has a Useful Notes page.

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Tropes associated with the time period:

• All-CGI Cartoon: Disney and other animation companies abandoned traditional animation during this decade, though towards the end of the decade there was some hope that the two might coexist. Of course, anime is stronger than ever before and still averts this trope for the most part. Furthermore, this form finally began to break down the All Animation Is Disney stereotype beginning with Dreamworks Animation hitting the big time with their 2001 smash hit CGI feature, Shrek, becoming the first real feature animation company to challenge Disney over the long term, although it would have a period of artistic decline until it came roaring back in 2008 with a new quality commitment in 2008 with Kung Fu Panda.
  • Interestingly, Stop-Motion animation has also received a re-invigoration, as it's become apparent that some aesthetics are better suited to Stop-motion than CG (one of the best examples being Flushed Away, which had the character designs of an Aardman Animations character, but were CG - audiences generally said the animation looked weird because of it. It also may have something to do with genre, as darker, spookier family movies are often stop-motion - Tim Burton has had mainstream success with Corpse Bride, and 2008's Coraline was also stop-motion.
• The Alleged Car: The SUV of this decade got this reputation for much the same reason as cars from The '70s did, because they were overweight gas guzzlers being sold during a Gas Crisis. One example that stands out is the Ford Excursion. The combination of its curb weight of 7230 lbs, and it's 6.8 L V-10 engine, make for the ultimate gas guzzling SUV, getting only 9.6 mpg.
• Ambiguous Ending: The decade's over, and yet many trends still persist through The New '10s, like The War on Terror.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Became less powerful due to the success of adult-oriented animated TV shows like South Park and Family Guy, and a large wave of adult oriented anime, but still exists to some extent.
• Anticlimax: When people in the twentieth century imagined what the 2000's would be like, it would either involve futuristic technology, the apocalypse or both. Come the Turn of the Millennium and we get... nothing much really.
• Auto-Tune: Existed before this decade with songs like Cher's Believe, but grew in popularity around the mid 2000s thanks to rappers like T-Pain, and soon spread to other artists like Rihanna and Snoop Dogg, as well as genres like pop and R&B.
• Bare Your Midriff: Continued on from the nineties in fashion and especially in pop music, with midriff-baring made even more extreme by the early-00s fashion for very low waistlines.
• Boy Band: Boy bands like *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys remained a 90's holdover, but generally faded away by 2002 or so.
• But Not Too White: Despite increased awareness of skin cancer, tan skin returned from the The '70s in full swing as a beauty standard in this decade, as demonstrated by the likes of Carmen Electra, Jessica Alba and Paris Hilton, among others.

• Blue Orange Contrast: began to spread like wildfire across the movie world with the advent of post-production digital coloring.
• Cash Cow Franchise: Every TV series or movie or video game that was successful during that decade.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Donald Trump, that rich guy from The Apprentice, ends up becoming one of the most controversial Presidents in U.S. history in the following decade.
• China Takes Over the World: Popular in fiction now that Japan doesn't have the cash to take over the world anymore and Russia is still a complete clusterfuck, even after 20 years.

• Color Wash: A grey filter, often Deliberately Monochrome, was often used in either serious science fiction films or young adult movies such as the first Twilight film and the later installments of Harry Potter to imply a Darker and Edgier tone.
• Darker and Edgier: 2001, where the September 11th attacks occurred, and 2005, with incidents such as Hurricane Katrina.
• Defective Detective: Started in 2000 with Monk, the trope namer, and spread with Psych, Life and Bored to Death. The Good Guys and Terriers seem to be continuing this trend.
• Digital Distribution: The "legitimisation" of downloadable music thanks to iTunes, the success of Valve's Steam platform for PC games and client/server shops on all the major consoles and the advent of On-Demand TV and film services have made this a reality.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Or is it? But as with the aformentiond Digital Distribution this is when it became mainstream and super-easy.
• Digital Piracy Is Okay: An unfortunately common opinion among people who didn't make their living in the arts.
• Early Installment Weirdness: In the United States, the period between the November, 2000 elections and 9/11 was notable for how completely unremarkable it was compared to the tumultuous rest of the decade. There's a reason why, culturally, this era was said to have started with 9/11.
• Emo Music: The music movement had slowely building in popularity throughout the 90's thanks to bands like Weezer and Get Up Kids, but in the 2000's it really broke through into the mainstream after it cross pollinated with goth and metal music thanks to bands like AFI, Thursday, My Chemical Romance, and Taking Back Sunday. It then sustained its popularity through the end of the decade thanks to Emo-Pop bands like Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and Paramore. It evolved into the alternative rock genre of choice for most teens of the era along with Indie Pop and Nu Metal
• Everyone Loves Blondes: For a while, yes, they really did. A disproportionately high number of sex symbols in the early-to-mid 2000s were blonde women, with Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera being a few of the more famous ones.
• Fountain of Memes: Most children's media of this decade in The New '10s (especially animated movies like Shrek), mostly out of combined Main/Irony and nostalgia.

• Girliness Upgrade: A decade saturated with pink, glitter, romantic comedies, pop stars, teen idols, socialites, boho clothing, lip smackers, and so on.
• Girl-on-Girl Is Hot: Homosexuality lost just enough taboo for pop culture to start shamelessly, abundantly mining this for fanservice. Especially on reality shows (as the first episode of reality TV parody Drawn Together demonstrated.) This is when the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss really took off.
• Guy-on-Guy Is Hot: Yaoi Fangirls first came to widespread public attention in this decade, leading to an increase in male Faux Yay, especially within the emo subculture, and deliberate Homoerotic Subtext in fictional works aimed at a young female demographic.
• Hip-Hop: Became one of the most popular music genre after pop music during that decade
• Hotter and Sexier: The music videos and advertising of the era saw new extremes of Fanservice, mainly to a male audience but occasionally to women.
• Hummer Dinger: Most of the giant SUVs sold during this decade.
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: YouTube itself first launched in 2005, followed by most forms of modern social media and, almost immediately after, the potential to abuse it.
• Kid Com: Both Disney and Nickelodeon shifted the focus of their networks to focus on "Tweencoms" and building franchises around the stars of their shows.
• Live-Action Adaptation: Scooby-Doo, Garfield, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Josie and the Pussycats, Transformers, Fat Albert, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and The Cat in the Hat, among many more.
• Long Title: Everywhere in music in the middle of the decade, regardless of genre.
• Memetic Mutation: Internet memes existed well before the '00s, but became a huge part of the series of tubes in this decade.
• Moe: This is the decade where anime execs really started mining this trope for big payoffs. This caused a lot of contention in the fanbase over the entire decade.
• Money Song: Many songs like that in this decade especially from rappers but occasionally singers would make a song like this.

• Moral Guardians: Post-9/11, everything became more conservative. See the Useful Notes page for more info.
• Network Decay: Started in The '90s with MTV, now it's moved on to just about every cable network.
• New Media Are Evil: The old media's reaction to the Internet.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Hooray; Saddam's evil empire is dea—wait; what's this about them being a huge supplier of oil, and our economy being based on oil?!
  • And all those violent groups who were kept in check by Saddam but are more able to bomb the streets now that he's gone?

• Nu Metal: Similar to the aforementioned Boy Band craze, it carried over from the '90s with some of the biggest acts such as Linkin Park and Evanescence emerging from that decade. Also similar to the boy band craze, nu metal's place in the mainstream died after 2003.
• Post-Grunge: Most of the mainstream rock music of this decade falls into this category. In fact, it was one of the few genres that wasn't Rap, Hip-Hop, R&B, or a derivative thereof that saw major airplay on mainstream radio. (Not counting oldies or classic rock stations of course). Though by The New '10s, this genre had worn out its welcome.

• Pretty Boy: The dominant standard of male beauty in this decade. A reaction against this led to many Western men in the '10s growing out their beards.
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: Many, many subcultures in this decade focused on this look, as a continuation from goth and punk, and to go against the tanned, blonde look which was popular in the mainstream at the time. This is the reverse but quite similar to the Ganguro fashion in '90s Japan, in which focused on tanned skin and bleached hair to rebel against the traditional Japanese beauty standard of white skin, black hair and modest beauty. Ganguro died out in this decade because in Japan, pale skin became even more desired with the influence of its pop singers and the rise of alternative fashion that focuses on cuteness and innocence.
• Reality TV: Not invented in this period, but it exploded in popularity thanks to shows like Survivor, American Idol, and Big Brother.
• Rhythm Game: Spearheaded by the rivalry of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, music games had a massive burst of popularity from around 2006 through 2009 before suddenly dying off due to market stagnation, and the 2008 Recession souring interest in games with expensive peripherals. Most rhythm games have now reverted to their status pre-Guitar Hero, being smaller, more niche games revolving around using regular controls rather than emulating it with peripherals.

• '70s Hair: Redux. Long male hair made a significant comeback among the decade's youth, thanks in no small part to the booming skate culture and The Lord of the Rings.
• Shaking the Rump: This was quite common in many hip hop music videos at that time.

• Stripperiffic: Just about every female pop star was expected to do at least one video in a bikini's worth of clothing or even less, and street fashion in real life sometimes imitated this.

• The End of the World as We Know It: Predicted. Multiple times. It did not happen... yet...
• The '80s: The decade of choice for much of this decade's nostalgia.

• Tsundere: The concept existed before this point, of course, but really seemed to take off in this decade, becoming a prominent character type even in Western media.
• When the Planets Align: May 5, 2000 was the date of a rather famous planetary alignment which included from Mercury all the way through Saturn; naturally, this figured into many Conspiracy Theories. Eternal Darkness even worked this alignment into the plot.
• Who Forgot the Lights?: The Great Northeast Blackout of 2003, the largest in North American history, left millions in the United States and Canada without electricity for days, which happened during the US war with Iraq, and caused many to believe that America was under attack.
• Wide Open Sandbox: Was one of the main genres of The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games thanks to the popularity of Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels.
• Wolverine Publicity: Most of the biggest celebrities in the 2000s like Paris Hilton.
• Uncanceled: Increased during this decade, especially after Family Guy was brought back thanks to DVD sales.
• Zeerust: All those science fiction movies taking place in 2000 look so old now.

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Works that were made in this time period:

• Animated Shows
• Anime and Manga
• Asian Animation
• Comic Books
• Eastern European Animation
• Fan Fic
• For Film, see: Films of the 2000s
• Hanguk Manhwa Aenimeisyeon
• For Literature, see Literature of the 2000s
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• New Media
• Newspaper Comics
• Pinball
• Professional Wrestling
• Radio
• Tabletop Games
• Theatre
• Theme Parks
• Toys
• Video Games
• Web Animation
• Web Comics
• Web Original
• Western Animation

Works set, but not made in the decade:

Anime

• Digimon Adventure tri.: Set in 2005, three years after Digimon Adventure 02.

Film

• American Sniper: Most of the movie takes place in this decade during the Third Iraq War.
• Zero Dark Thirty: Largely all about the The War on Terror, specifically the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Because of this, the film largely takes place during this decade.
• The Big Short takes place in the time leading up to the 2008 Great Recession.
• The Night Before flashbacks take place from 2001-2006.
• Easy A flashbacks take place mostly around the middle of the decade.

Literature

• The Red And The Rest constantly calls attention to the technology and culture of the pre-9/11 noughties while hinting at the awful event to come.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse: Majority of its characters' backstories and the most important flashbacks happened in this decade.
  • From Arrow: Oliver was shipwrecked in 2007 and was forced to survive for the next five years doing things unimaginable after being marooned on an island, meeting people different people in the process who mostly will factor to his superhero career later on. Meanwhile, Diggle and his wife were veterans during The War on Terror, with the former serving the U.S. army until 2008.
  • From The Flash (2014): Barry's mother was killed at the very beginning of the decade and his father was framed by the killer. Barry traveled back to this fateful night a few times using his Time Travel capabilities. Speaking of the killer, he immediately searched for the man responsible for Barry gaining his Super Speed as he needs Barry's speed to return to the future so he killed and replaced the man to accelerate Barry's Superhero Origin. Nine years later, the killer now impersonating the Big Good frees a certain Killer Gorilla in case he needs a contingency for his Evil Plan.
  • From Legends of Tomorrow: Sara was with Oliver during the shipwreck. Instead of being marooned like he was, she was recovered by a group of mercenaries before crossing paths with Oliver for a brief period of time the following year. After that, she was rescued and recruited by a world-renowned Murder, Inc.. She also traveled back to that year months before her shipwreck as the Villain of the Week wants to Ret Gone her.
  • From Supergirl (2015): Kara landed on Earth in 2003. Two years later, her adoptive father was forced by a certain government official to participate in a manhunt mission for a certain alien refugee. Both men disappeared for months, until the alien refugee returns impersonating said government official to take over his life.
• The first season of Daredevil flashes back to 2009 during The Hero and his best friend's first meeting in college.
• The first season of Fargo is set in 2006.
• The Flash (1990) travels to a Bad Future set in the very beginning of the decade. Cue Zeerust.
• How I Met Your Mother is a weird case since the story is being told by The Hero from 2030. The first four and a half seasons are set from September 2005 to December 2009, though occasional flashbacks to the earlier parts of the decade happens (usually involving their first meeting with their Token Evil Teammate), and even to both The '90s (his and his True Companions' high school and college years plus one of them's Teen Idol days) and The '80s (their childhood).

Video Games

• The prologue to Grand Theft Auto V takes place in 2004, complete with a pre-smartphone mobile phone.
• Metal Gear: Metal Gear Solid takes place in 2005, while Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is set on both 2007 (prologue starring Solid Snake) and 2009 (main Story Arc starring Raiden).

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