The National Geographic Channel will air a miniseries in July called The ’90s: The Last Great Decade?, because that’s a totally legitimate framing device for a talking-head show that’s supposed to be more serious than I Love the ’90s. According to Deadline, Rob Lowe will narrate the series, just as he did for the network’s The ’80s: The Decade That Made Us. Perhaps no one at the NGC is familiar with Betteridge’s law of headlines, which we’ll stretch here to apply to the title of a show: The law states that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” If the answer were “yes,” you wouldn’t need the question mark! One could simply write something declarative. Anyway, no, the ’90s were not the “last great decade,” because who knows what the future holds? Maybe more great decades, maybe apes on horseback, maybe horses on apeback, as Conan once predicted. At best, the ’90s were the most recent great decade, and even that feels like a stretch. Time is not a contest.
