The centre of gravity moved to television
The Sopranos ran from 1999 to 2007 and established the terms: a protagonist you could not fully endorse, a running time measured in dozens of hours, and a writers' room given the authority previously reserved for directors. The Wire followed from 2002, Mad Men from 2007, Breaking Bad from 2008, Succession from 2018. Between them they trained an audience to expect that the most interesting acting in any given month would be on a television.
The structural reason is simple arithmetic. A film gives a performer roughly two hours to establish a person; a five-season drama gives them fifty. The trade-off is that the long form has nowhere to hide: a weak episode is a weak fortnight, and a character who wears out has to keep appearing anyway.
Characters who outgrew their shows
A screen icon is usually a character rather than a production. Tony Soprano in a dressing gown at the end of a driveway. Walter White in a porkpie hat, a look that became a Halloween costume within about a season and a half of Breaking Bad's debut. Don Draper in silhouette against an advertising board. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, who came from the stage in 2013 and reached television in 2016 and 2019, exported an entire technique — the direct address to camera, used as a confession the other characters cannot hear — into shows that had nothing else in common with it.
The test is whether the image survives separation from the plot. Most fictional people do not pass it. The ones who do tend to have a single strong visual idea attached: a costume, a posture, a gesture you can perform at a party.
The performance that becomes the reference
Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) is the century's most-imitated screen villain, and the imitation has been thorough enough to become its own cultural irritant. Robert Downey Jr played Tony Stark from Iron Man in 2008 through to Avengers: Endgame in 2019, a continuous eleven-year characterisation with no real precedent in mainstream cinema. Daniel Craig held James Bond from Casino Royale in 2006 to No Time to Die in 2021 and, unusually for the role, was allowed an ending.
What these have in common is duration or shock. Either a performer inhabits a part long enough that the part becomes them, or the performance arrives so far outside the expected register for that kind of film that it reorganises what people think the genre can do.
Subtitles stopped being a barrier
In 2020 Parasite became the first film not in the English language to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, having taken the Palme d'Or at Cannes the previous year. It was the visible peak of a slower shift. Netflix and its competitors made dubbed and subtitled drama a default row on the home screen rather than a specialist section, and Squid Game in 2021 demonstrated that a Korean-language series with an unfamiliar cast could become a global costume and a playground game within about a month.
This has consequences worth stating plainly: the pipeline of available screen icons is now much wider than the Anglophone industry, and the industry's award bodies have been visibly catching up rather than leading.
Release patterns changed what a shared moment is
Weekly broadcast created appointment television and, with it, the water-cooler conversation. The all-at-once streaming drop replaced that with the spoiler economy, where the shared experience is compressed into a weekend and then gone. Several platforms subsequently reverted to weekly episodes for their biggest titles, which tells you how much the sustained conversation was worth. Neither model is simply better: the binge serves the show, the weekly release serves the audience around it.
Who the awards notice
The 2015 and 2016 acting nominations prompted the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, begun by the writer April Reign, and the Academy responded with changes to its membership and representation standards. Michaela Coel wrote and starred in I May Destroy You in 2020 and won the Emmy for writing a limited series in 2021. Chloé Zhao won Best Director for Nomadland in 2021, only the second woman to take the award after Kathryn Bigelow in 2010. Awards are a lagging indicator of taste, but they are a legible one.
Telling a screen icon from a hit
- The silhouette test. Can it be drawn in six lines and still be recognised?
- The clip test. Does a thirty-second extract circulate without context and still land?
- The imitation test. Do other productions borrow the technique, not just the premise?
- The decade test. Does anyone reference it once its own promotional cycle is over?
Plenty of enormous titles fail at least two of these and remain excellent. Iconic and good are different measurements, and conflating them is how lists end up recommending things nobody wants to watch twice.