Seinfeld‘s 1998 finale was watched by 76 million people, and we’re still talking about it, if the trends on X are any indication.
For the generations that grew up under true mass media, broadcast culture, it seemed like it would continue forever. Our grandparents watched I Love Lucy, our parents watched All in the Family, and we watched Seinfield. It seemed likely that this stuff would persist, that mass culture would just keep going, producing more trends.
And then the tech changed, and it became obvious that mass culture was an anomaly of corporate organization meeting the technological paradigm of spectrum scarcity.
The stranger thing is that for Gen X and older millennials, that last burst in the 1990s and 2000s will always be common cultural touchstones, long after a common culture has ceased to exist.
The same is basically true with music. Rock and roll too is now pretty much what jazz became. After a 40-year period of discovery and innovation, the form peaked and then descended into endless nostalgia, where everyone is simply playing the hits, or iterating on forms pioneered in a historical period that ended before they were even born.