Breaking Bad
TWD
GoT
Scandal??
TBBT?

i think we've beyond the idea that pop-culture of our times can be defiend or signified by certain products. This isn't the 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s. A show like Seinfeld for instance defined the 90s even those who didn't like it reacted to it and even those who didn't watch it were aware of it. 00s were fairly gray and the 2010s have been even more. Shows are popular in demos and groups but on a macro-scale, it's just not really the same. I know a significant amount of people who have never seen BBT, BB, GoT, etc and have no awareness of them.

The idea of a shared macro-culture is lost. Everyone picks and chooses what they like. No show signifies anything anymore. Years don't have as much value as they do. No one is going to be like, "this defined the half decade of 2010-2014" like they would when they say "that was early 80s" or "that was late 90s".

Yeah, music (pop singles though and nothing else) I think still can do it because it's so easy now for pop to penetrate the mass-culture. Circa late 2012/early 2013, everyone who had access to the internet basically had heard Gangnam Style.

Top commerical movies, despite what the naysayers think, are still significantly more popular than TV. 50m+ people in USA/Canada saw HG, TDKR, and Avengers in 2012 at the box office, and tens of milions of more probably saw those films in the next few years after. In just two or so years after their release, those films have likely been seen by 75m+ people. That's a significant bigger number than any number any TV show today can do (and that's just domestically; add in overseas and the gap becomes significantly bigger).

While the quality of TV shows has gone up, the importance of TV shows on a pop-culture scale in someways has diminished. As much as everyone who saw The Wire wants to praise it as one of the greatest shows ever made, the simple fact is that the amount of people who have seen that show is quite small compared to just other TV shows let alone other pop-culture products.

And popularity is significant in terms of trying to "define" a time period.

Beavis and Buthead movie did 63m in 1996 (which adjusts to about 115m today). I gurantee that almost any modern day TV show that was made into a movie today wouldn't break 100m. Only exception would be if GoT decided to end the entire series with a giant movies.

Also, B&B was relevant because people identified themselves with it. There were plenty of dudes in the 90s who were similar to those two fictional characters. As much as people love BB, I don't think many people identify themselves with the show.

As I said albums don't matter anymore. But singles are more popular nwo than ever before. And I agree, it's more about the song than the arist (except in very few cases like Beyonce) but that doesn't chagne the fact that the song is relevant.