Portlandia was fundamentally an expression of the Obama era, which is why it had to end

The A.V. Club

“We should be clear about something: Portlandia was always going to end this year,” says William Hughes, “regardless of who won the big prize in 2016. (Eight seasons is a damn long run for any sketch series that isn’t Saturday Night Live.) But Trump’s victory still felt like a retroactive death knell for the show, a widespread political statement that that dream of the ’90s might be well and truly dead. Like some kind of beautiful but easily disturbed freshwater fish, Portlandia was a product of a dangerously hope-rich environment. And while it’ll be fascinating to see how well it can swim during this last batch of episodes, we can’t really blame it if it doesn’t get very far in a world where the chemicals it was born and bathed in—things like safety, equality, comfort, and, most especially, that Obama-propagated idea that ‘Things are going to be okay’—are suddenly in such drastically short supply.”

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