Last month I went with my husband and father to watch Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, a gloriously silly paean to Swedish pop music, the Mediterranean (a postcard version of it, anyway) and the pleasure of watching famous people burst – without any evident embarrassment – into song and dance. Dad said he was in need of a pick-me-up, and exclaimed after the film: “It was a hoot!”

He seemed to echo the thoughts of many critics, who wrote about Mamma Mia as if they were starved of fresh air and sunshine, and in desperate need of some light. “Here We Go Again is uncomplicated joy in complicated, despairing times,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “It’s hot, it’s muggy and the news is an ever-widening gyre of flaming airborne chili-festival Porta Potties,” conceded NPR’s Glen Weldon, “so how about we forgo a review that seeks to advance any cool, objective argument on the relative cinematic worth of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.”

In the last 10 years the developed world has been through a global recession, several particularly hostile and divisive election cycles, Brexit, fake news, the #MeToo moment and far-right political parties gaining traction all over the world. Why wouldn’t I want to watch Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard writhe around the bow of a boat to “Dancing Queen”?

I left the theatre with a serotonin high I haven’t felt watching a television show or movie in years. I barely remember the original Mamma Mia film but I don’t think I had the same reaction to it – the exhilaration of escape and enjoyment in weird and difficult times.

Last week Peter Kavinsky became the Internet’s Boyfriend when we all watched Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, in which a teenage girl finds that love letters to her crushes have been made public. It’s sweet, affectionate and relaxing watching two young people fall into what seems like a healthy and loving relationship (imagine!). It’s a much better film than Mamma Mia, but the response to it is similarly effusive. And the message is plain: emotional catharsis is cool again. Escapism is cool again. Joy is cool again.

“It’s brought about a softness in its audience that feels radical – a direct response both to a dangerous and inhospitable political climate,” Alanna Bennett wrote on Thursday for Buzzfeed. Sophia Benoit wrote in GQ that we’re all a little “horny for wholesome”.

“Wholesome wasn’t always this appealing, so why now? Just look at the world around us,” she said.

We might have liked these films if they came out 10 years ago but I don’t think the response to them would have been so enthusiastic if I had not spent the past few years watching the news every day with horror and revulsion. Lily James’ breathless cartwheeling through an orange grove might have come off as painfully corny if I had not been deep into the comments section of a Facebook news post hundreds of times over the last decade. Now it looks like something I’d like to be doing.

I used to love Handmaid’s Tale and Mad Men and The Dark Knight. But dystopian fiction and cynical dramas feel less palatable as we veer increasingly close to the real thing. I’m less eager to see pop culture that exposes the worst of our society when it’s already made so plain before us in a never-ending feed of bad news, angry argument and hate speech.

There’s nothing that signifies our need for predictable triumph more than the Rom-Com Renaissance, the return of the sweet and inevitable happy ending. We’re now so much more gleeful about films like Netflix’s Set It Up and Crazy Rich Asians.

It’s not just Mamma Mia getting the “oh well, we all need a little joy” treatment. Take the reception to Netflix’s Queer Eye reboot. “2018 has the TV it needs,” declared the Guardian. “There’s something cathartic about its Purple America spirit, contrived and reductive as it can be,” wrote the New York Times. What a relief to cry, to connect and to wrap up the issues that divide us into an easily digestible 30-minute television show that we can binge watch on a Saturday.

The New Yorker’s Robin Wright found “hope” in America’s Got Talent. So much for the days of Simon Cowell’s caustic takes. What’s en vogue now is Nailed It, Netflix’s warm-hearted show about baking disasters, the gentle cosiness of The Great British Baking Off and co-workers who love each other on Brooklyn 99. Even a rather negative review of Making It, Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman’s purposefully feel-good show about crafting, by the Washington Post’s Hank Steuver, said: “Children are in cages, thermometers are rising, ice caps are melting. We take mental and emotional refuge wherever we can find it, armed with glue guns.”

It seems, in 2018, that we’re craving comfort pop culture like we crave comfort food.

If you believe, like I do, that things we watch and enjoy are a reflection of who we are as a society – what we value and what is important – then what we we’re really valuing today is a little break from reality.

