Random thought about suspension of disbelief

I think the general audience for fiction, judging by current pop culture, is developing a more resilient suspension of disbelief. This occurred to me as I watched the last episode of Flashforward.  Now several years ago, a series like that would place the universe changing event at some (probably indeterminate) point in the future.  Major disaster movies avoided explicit references to dates because of the fear, probably justified, that if someone saw last month’s newspaper on the set of Eathquake, they’d be thrown out of the story.  Apparently, judging by Flashforward that’s no longer a concern.  Not only is the storyline explicitly contemporaneous, the date in the storyline is pretty much the air-date of the episode, but the President of the United States in the series is not Obama, and is in fact in a second term.  So its universe is definitively alternate history, diverging at least in 2004 if not earlier.