It's 2004 Week at The A.V. Club, which is so fetch

Late summer brings with it many things: last-minute vacations (and flings), intense heat, ever-so-slightly cooler breezes, wistfulness, and, this year in Chicago, at least, the Democratic National Convention. It’s also the time of year that The A.V. Club cranks up the nostalgia engine to revisit and reassess the pop culture from two decades prior. We know, we missed a couple of years of these retrospective packages, but we’re back in full force for 2004 Week—the year that gave us Spider-Man 2, Lost, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and “Long Term Parking” deserves nothing less.

Get ready to hit the NOS or CRUNK!!!, because we’ve got six days of retrospectives ahead (even pop culture obsessives need to rest on Sunday). We’re kicking things off with a trip down indie-rock memory lane, going back to the international flight that started a TV revolution, and marking the turning points for genre films and tie-in games. We’ll also chart the rise of Atlanta’s music scene and examine a network’s scramble for a sure thing in a soon-to-be-Friends-less world. Naturally, we’ll dive into our picks for the best films of 2004, as well as the realities of chasing down prestige TV before the advent of VOD.

Our retrospective weeks have never just been about mining nostalgia; we’ve always endeavored to highlight what these movies, albums, shows, and songs reveal about the time in which they were released. Increasingly, these packages have given us (newer staffers and veterans) a chance to learn more about The A.V. Club itself, and how to keep its mission of incisive cultural criticism alive. So, get in, losers friends, we’re going back to 2004.