If you go back past the 1950s-1960s TV era to the early 20th century, there's quite a bit of the dark and gritty stuff. The movie "Metropolis" (1927, Fritz Lan

If you go back past the 1950s-1960s TV era to the early 20th century, there's quite a bit of the dark and gritty stuff. The movie "Metropolis" (1927, Fritz Lang) is a fairly dystopian work, for example. A lot of popular writing from that era has a similar flavor. By that measure, the 50s and 60s were an unhealthy aberration, a one-sided positivity culture similar in style to fascist and communist propaganda regimes that never mentioned the negative aspects of those systems. I personally like William Gibson's take on this, from Gernsback Continuum: > "But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world." > "Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."