AVQ&A: What pop culture screams 2005 to you?

The A.V. Club's weeklong retrospective ends with the pop culture that best captures 2005 for us.

By A.V. Club Staff  |  August 16, 2025 | 12:00pm
Clockwise from left: The Office (Photo: NBC); The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Photo: Buena Vista Pictures); Halo 2 (Image: Microsoft); From Under The Cork Tree (Image: Ocean Studios). Graphic: The A.V. Club
Aux Features 2005 Week
AVQ&A: What pop culture screams 2005 to you?
Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

As 2005 Week comes to a close, The A.V. Club staff answers the requisite AVQ&A: What pop culture screams 2005 to you?

As always, we invite you to contribute your own responses in the comments—and send in some prompts of your own! If you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected].

Alligator by The National

Back in 2005, Alligator felt (at least to my friends and I) like this underrated little masterpiece. When the band performed at Schubas in Chicago during a co-headlining tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (who had just received a ton of buzz for its self-released debut LP), it wasn’t surprising that so much of the audience left after CYHSY’s opening set—but it was dispiriting, as The National was clearly the better band. Two years later, the outfit would break out with Boxer and continue getting bigger—to the point where they headlined an arena in Brooklyn. But I always have a soft spot for Alligator and its striking drumbeats by Bryan Devendorf and even more striking lyrics by Matt Berninger, who drops late-night, lost-romance lines like “I wanna go gator around the warm beds of beginners,” “I’m on a good mixture—I don’t wanna waste it,” and “I have weird memories of you pissing in a sink” all in the same song. [Tim Lowery]

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (2005)

No book made a bigger impression on my anxiety-ridden teenage brain than Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which taught me that the end of the world could be not just manageable, but hilarious. The book’s 2005 film adaptation delivered a slightly less profound, if still impactful moral: Sometimes, Hollywood is just going to screw up Your Thing, and you have to live with it. Garth Jennings’ film is, in hindsight, fine: Martin Freeman and Alan Rickman both do good comedic work, and Mos Def is engagingly weird as an alien hitchhiker. But even at 21, I could feel the absence of Adams—dead four years previous—palpably, as the film lacked the fleetness that marked the man’s work when he was truly flying. That’s 2005 to me: Realizing that sometimes, something precious really has left the Earth for good, and all you can do is accept what’s left. [William Hughes]

Halo 2 on Xbox Live

Though the Halo sequel came out before the holiday season in 2004, pretty much everyone I know got the game that November, practiced for a few weeks so as not to embarrass themselves in multiplayer, and then spent a full calendar year getting absolutely demolished online. I was a freshman in high school, so my nerd friends and I were the platonic ideal demographic for spending our weekends not with dates, but crammed into a smelly room festooned with crowded widescreens, overheating consoles, worn-out beanbags, and empty energy drink cans. Xbox Live hated to see our squad coming, both because we were terrible at Halo 2 and because we loved to talk trash in the pregame lobby—this was the true draw for loudmouthed teens. I’m not sure I looked up from Zanzibar and Sanctuary until 2006. [Jacob Oller]

Grey's Anatomy

It’s weird to think of Grey’s Anatomy as a 2005-specific pop culture moment, considering the medical drama’s impressive lifespan, with its 22nd season premiere mere months away. As someone who started watching the show from the beginning and still feels an unhealthy emotional attachment to the doctors of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, I can’t help but recall how it all drew me in. I was just as enamored by the Meredith and Derek romance as I was by the core friendships (“You are my person”), the world-building, cases, and, of course, a monumental cliffhanger—at least it felt like it back then for me—with Addison’s arrival in the finale. To me, Grey’s was the best mix of soapy and serious, boasted compelling characters and setting, featured a killer soundtrack, and infused bouts of much-needed levity—all factors that set it up for success. I tune in every week despite the ebbs and flows in quality and numerous cast changes; what am I going to do, stop after a 20-year investment? There’s just no denying the cultural impact of Grey’s Anatomy on the zeitgeist, and, perhaps more importantly, on my impressionable mind. [Saloni Gajjar]

Aly & AJ, Into The Rush

I’m a well-known Aly & AJ stan, but I come by it honestly: 20 years ago, I was still very much in my Disney Channel phase. We tweens would find “cool” music based on what soundtracked DCOMs or played between episodes of Kim Possible and The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody. The sister duo released their first-ever album in 2005 on Disney’s label, and to me those two girls not much older than I was writing their own pop-rock album was the epitome of cool. Just look how incredibly 2005 the looks in the video for the single “No One” are: the pink lip gloss, the printed tees and skinny scarves, the spiked bracelet. There was a sanitized edge to the look and the music that reminds me of what it was like to be growing up in the early 2000s, but luckily I’ve had the pleasure of growing up alongside their sound and watching it mature as I did. [Mary Kate Carr]

Mariah Carey, The Emancipation Of Mimi

There are two quintessential-to-me 2005 albums: One is Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm, and the other is The Emancipation Of Mimi. Mariah Carey’s 10th studio album has all the markings of the mid-aughts: genre fusion,  music videos wherein the songbird wanders around an empty mansion bedecked in jewelry. What also plants it in the year 2005 for me is the feeling that Carey had cast off the dead weight in her life to find her voice (again)—a great message for someone, like myself, who had entered into adulthood. But beyond that bit of personal history, Emancipation Of Mimi endures because it’s as packed with bangers as it is soul-stirring love songs, including one of the greatest heartbreak songs of all time (see above). [Danette Chavez]

The Office U.S.

The Office premiered in March 2005, and I was a pop-culturally pretentious teen who revered Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s BBC comedy. Crowded around a friend’s basement bedroom TV/VCR combo for the premiere, we had zero faith that NBC’s must-see TV version would be anything more than a Xerox, and in its first season, we were correct. But the show has been inescapable since that first season. It launched stars Steve Carell, John Krasinski, and Mindy Kaling, a popular sibling series, Parks & Recreation, and a cottage industry of supporting players reminiscing about their time on the sitcom. Arriving three months before Reddit launched, the show inspired a wellspring of downcast, reference-heavy, cringe-on-purpose millennial humor that generations above and below us continue to mock. That we have a new spin-off 20 years later speaks to the quest to return to the time of its premiere. We’ve been trapped in 2005 ever since. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge Of The Sith

Obviously, Revenge Of The Sith was the biggest movie of 2005 by most metrics. But it was also the focal point of my early childhood as a kid born in the mid-to-late ’90s who spent an inordinate amount of the 2000s whacking my brother with a plastic lightsaber. It was a cultural event, the end to a series in an era when we still believed there was a ceiling to how many sequels any property could have. It was a big enough deal that both my parents picked us up early from school to catch a matinée screening, a prospect I cannot imagine they would have done for any other movie. Yes, Revenge is far and away the strongest film of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and it goes darker than maybe any other film in the whole franchise. But Star Wars has always had something for the kids, and going to the movie theater on a weekday afternoon, it felt like 2005 had a second Christmas. [Drew Gillis]

Fall Out Boy, From Under The Cork Tree

For alternative tweens in 2005, Fall Out Boy’s From Under The Cork Tree was a seminal album. It was also the first time many of us had to deal with the uniquely teenage pain of watching a previously underground band “sell out” and get co-opted by the mainstream. I’d been a fan of Fall Out Boy since Take This To Your Grave,  their 2003 debut album released on indie label Fueled By Ramen, and I was not at all prepared for the massive success that would come with the major-label release of FUCT (that acronym felt so subversive back then, as we snickered over it behind our Trapper Keepers and doodled it in the pages of our notebooks). I watched with equal parts excitement and dismay as “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” took over mainstream pop radio stations. I was happy that, for once, the music I loved wasn’t considered “weird,” but I was also reticent to share it with so many people who I was certain didn’t have as deep a connection to it as I did. It seems so inconsequential now, but back then, it was everything. [Jen Lennon]

Sharkboy And Lavagirl

Sharkboy And Lavagirl—or, The Adventures Of Sharkboy And Lavagirl In 3-D, to call it by its government name—is bad. If you’ve watched the movie any time in the past decade or so, you’ll know that the Spy Kids wannabe feels akin to what I would imagine the inside of a kid’s brain looks like after getting laughing gas at the dentist, and not in a good way. When I saw it in 2005, though, I was entranced. I’d never seen anything like those god-awful 3D effects before, and they made me feel like I was singing that “dream dream dream” song right alongside baby Taylor Lautner. I doubt Sharkboy & Lavagirl will receive a glowing reappraisal any time soon, but it’s still an exceptionally fun time capsule and a good reminder that if you’ve ever found yourself complaining about the way movies look now, the situation used to be so much worse. [Emma Keates]

 

 
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