Shortly after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter announced,”It’s the end of the age of irony” — just one of many proclamations that augured a more somber cultural landscape.

The effect of 9/11 on pop culture is chief among the angles used to contextualize today’s five-year anniversary. Interested readers may want to start with a visit to the Boston Globe website, where in addition to reading a package of stories on how the arts world has responded — including theater, music and books — you can listen to the newspaper’s television, film and pop culture critics discuss the differences between television and movies’ handling of 9/11 and its aftermath.

The Philadelphia Inquirer looks back at how quickly life returned to “normal” after 9/11 in an article titled, “A more serious country? Get serious.” Case in point: Within six months of 9/11, “Fear Factor” aired the Playboy-centerfold edition.

“Those irony pronouncements were coming from people who profoundly misunderstood the nature of American popular culture,” Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture and television at Syracuse University, tells the Inquirer. “No matter how horrific the event, to expect an entire culture to change in one day is like going on a diet and expecting to lose 100 pounds in one day. Cultures absorb events like 9/11. American culture is a powerful solvent.”

(The article’s author, Alfred Lubrano, also notes that while church attendance, charitable giving and volunteering may have increased after 9/11, the long-term effect was negligible.)

The Sunday Herald looks at how 9/11 changed the world in nine brief essays. In “The Impact on Popular Culture,” Graeme Virtue reminds us of the swift, if confused, response. “Digital artists removed all traces of the Twin Towers from footage already shot for blockbuster Spider-Man, though director Sam Raimi inserted new dialogue hymning New York,” he writes. “But as more people began chipping away at the subject, it ceased to be so terrifyingly big. The first mainstream 9/11 joke appeared in Anger Management, an Adam Sandler comedy released in 2003.”

Over at the L.A. Times, Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” reflects on post-9/11 humor, “Whenever there’s a tragedy, comedians are presented with a dilemma: When is the right time to make jokes about it, and what kind of jokes can you make?” Back in the fall of 2001, comments that questioned the wisdom of President Bush or his administration were risky (for Maher, at least, whose previous show, “Politically Incorrect,” was cancelled by ABC), but the atmosphere was more relaxed by the end of that year — as evidenced by the return to Bush-is-dumb jokes.

I’ll write more soon about fall television line-up, but this Baltimore Sun story deserves mention here for its analysis of the influence of 9/11 (along with new viewing technologies) on the new crop of complex, serialized dramas — which critic David Zurawik calls “perfect vehicles for stories that grapple with the anxieties of a post-9/11 world.” Television executives join in the analysis:

“Kidnapped is about a cataclysmic event just like the plane crash in Lost, or, in real life, the attacks of 9/11,” says Vivi Zigler, executive vice president of current primetime series for NBC, which has four serialized dramas this fall.

“I do think 9/11 has changed things. As a nation, we watched 9/11 play out over time, and we went through mourning and denial communally. I do think there is a sentiment now in viewers - not all viewers, and I don’t mean to generalize or stereotype - but I do think there is a greater interest in consuming programs that make you feel that they are based in realism. Serialized drama is more analogous to the way life works. Your life doesn’t stop and everything is neatly resolved at the end of a day.”

While Eisner’s [Abe] Novick sees an “element of something dangerous” underlying the worldview of many of the new dramas, he also points out that a few grapple with society’s interest, intensified by the events of 9/11, for a “certain kind of heroism” in which ordinary men and women manage to transcend a crisis. That, he says, is a direct attempt by network executives to air programs “that resonate with 9/11.”

Looking back at series that have been audience and critical hits over the past few years, Matthew Gilbert, television critic for the Boston Globe, sees “Rescue Me,” the series starring Denis Leary as an emotionally charged firefighter, as the perfect example of a post-9/11 interpretation of the chaos of daily life.

Since that Tuesday morning, TV has been crammed with “24″-like suspense series that play off terror cells, homeland security, and Muslim villains. But the New York-set drama evokes only how the attacks altered the ordinary American lives in the shadows of the towers that fell.

It has a strong parallel in the 1946 movie “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which captured the weight of World War II through the psychology of soldiers returning home, and not through battlefield or political action. On “Rescue Me,” too, the battles aren’t global; they’re personal, spiritual, religious.

Viewers have complained that the series jumps too flippantly from black comedy to tragedy and back again. But the schizoid tone of “Rescue Me,” which recently turned a funeral into a wedding, is a mark of its post-9/11 identity.

Pop critic Joanna Weiss credits “Lost” for accurately reflecting the post-9/11 mood:

Through “Lost,” we get war-in-Iraq wish fulfillment: Sayid, the noblest survivor, fled the Republican Guard due to his conscience and flogs himself emotionally when he tortures someone. Through “Lost,” we meet our enemies in the form of “Others,” elusive and far more sophisticated than they look. They hide as sleeper agents, awaiting the moment to strike. They view the castaways as invaders.

But what really makes “Lost” a post-9/11 parable is mood. This is a show about uncertainty and indecision, about learning that a beautiful world is actually full of threats. It’s a paranoid fall from paradise.

Finally, “Did Jack Bauer replace James Bond?” That’s the title of this commentary in the L.A. Times by Leo Braudy, which looks at film and television’s interpretation of world events during the Cold War. By comparison, Baudy thinks there’s an absence of “a more visible 9/11-spawned pop culture.”

Certainly the majority of the new television shows cited above seem to be tackling personal anxiety instead of larger political threats (though viewers might look again to science fiction — particularly the critically acclaimed “Battlestar Galactica” — for more urgent storytelling).

Or maybe we’re looking for the wrong story. A recent editorial in the Times (UK) Online notes:

Few serious writers or film-makers have not somehow incorporated their reactions to 9/11 in their work since then. But fewer still have tackled it head on, partly for fear of being seen to exploit victims? grief or the pornographically violent stock of imagery produced by those murderous 100 minutes; and partly on the assumption that their audiences had already been fed a surfeit of news footage that needed little captioning [....]

[L]ike Pearl Harbor, 9/11 may prove less engrossing to creative minds than its aftermath. Hollywood?s next Vietnam will not be the twin towers, but Iraq.