A lot has been said about TV in 2004. That it was the best year of television of all time, the peak of the Golden Age of television. Or maybe that it was the year reality television became too much, suddenly showing up on every channel as we flipped the switch. But as famed Hollywood producer and UFO enthusiast Bryce Zabel wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2004, it was the end of television as we knew it. He chalked it up to the prevalence of TiVo and DVR in American households and predicted an upheaval so severe the whole advertising business would crumble — and he didn’t even know about streaming yet.
The shift was one that a lot of people felt in real time. For many, it was through the show Lost, which debuted in 2004 and created a…
