John Baskin in The Point:
I grew up in the age of the crisis of men. Already a frequent subject of national headlines when I became a teenager in the early Nineties (extensively catalogued by Susan Faludi in her 1999 book Stiffed), by the early 2000s, when I was in college, the burdens of contemporary manhood had become the dominant theme of prestige television and film. There were the belated men, the ones who had come “too late,” as Tony Soprano memorably put it to his psychiatrist, and thus instead of getting to build the country with their biceps were stuck in therapy and a rapidly feminizing suburbia, watching helplessly as the old codes were violated and then forgotten completely. There were the nostalgic men, like Don Draper, who aspired to live in the sepia-toned world that he famously pitched as an advertising template to Kodak executives on Mad Men. There were the men who found in violence and criminality a temporary respite from the confines of contemporary manhood—Tony again, but also Walter White on Breaking Bad and Frank Lucas in American Gangster. And there were the ones who impersonated a clearly disintegrated authority to unconsciously comedic effect, like Michael Scott in The Office. If you had to choose, the best among bad options at the time was to become one of Judd Apatow’s hapless husbands; sure, these were pudgy man-children destined to be remembered as footnotes even by their own families, but at least they seemed to be in on the joke.
More here.