Though technically released Christmas 2013, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street defined the spirit of 2014. It was the year we stopped pretending vice was tragic. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort wasn't a cautionary tale; he was a rock star. Quaaludes, hookers, yacht sinkings, and insider trading were presented with the kinetic energy of a Super Bowl ad.
This article explores how popular media in 2014 captured, critiqued, and commodified the dark side of city life, turning the underbelly of the metropolis into the ultimate form of modern entertainment. The Prestige TV Boom: Dark Cities and Moral Decay
Maya Cross, 34. Former foreign correspondent. Now a segment producer for City Beat: Vice Patrol , a low-rent cable news magazine show that airs after Cops reruns. She wears skinny jeans, a blazer over a band t-shirt, and the exhausted expression of someone who has edited too much tragedy into 90-second packages.
Maya’s feed flickered. A notification popped up, red and urgent. It wasn't from the network.
On the opposite coast, Silicon Valley premiered in 2014. While comedic, it perfectly captured the vice of false modesty . The city (San Francisco/Palo Alto) was portrayed as a dystopia of Pied Piper algorithms, bro culture, and rapid rent hikes. The vice here was —the belief that a line of code justifies moral bankruptcy. The show’s humor derived from watching engineers, who claimed to want to "make the world a better place," commit horrific acts of petty betrayal for server space.
No piece of 2014 content better encapsulates "city vices" than Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective . Set against the decaying industrial sprawl of Louisiana (Carcosa, Erath, Beaumont), the show presented the city not as a place of opportunity, but as a hellish loop. The vice here was occultish predation lurking beneath civic infrastructure. Rust Cohle’s famous monologues about time being a flat circle directly tied to the urban grid—you cannot escape your vices because the streets keep leading you back to them. The entertainment value came from the slow, dreadful realization that the city’s corruption is systemic, not individual.