Time Bomb Y2K

Remember when we thought the world was going to end? No, not that time. The one before.

The HBO documentary film Time Bomb Y2K is an immersive, all-archival examination of the mass hysteria that surrounded the “Y2K” millennium bug in the run-up to the turn of the century, and how the phenomenon changed the fabric of modern society.

CNN.com says, “As the doc makes clear, it’s not that there was no cause for apprehension, only that as is so often true, many of the reactions quickly devolved into overreactions, making it hard to separate the sober analysis from the science fiction and charlatans… There seemed to be little caution about platforming those crying wolf in the most provocative terms, and no real penalty for being conspicuously wrong,” they note, saying the film “speaks to the excesses of that earlier period in a way that connects directly to the present, providing a taste of how media frenzies happen filtered through the 20th Century’s final freakout.”