There’s this meme from a while ago that observes the fact that the 80’s and early 90’s weren’t as colourful and flashy as most media make them out to be. In fact almost everything ranging from clothing to furniture to advertising was a drab shade ranging between dark brown to orange.
Every once in a while you’d get a toy or a household appliance that would be a bright neon colour and it would be considered hi tech advanced fancy stuff (until it broke the next day).
Nowadays you’d have to look hard for dark brown/orange drab stuff. They make dark brown/orange stuff but it usually is made of a veneer of fancy wood and it’ll cost you an arm and a leg. (And then it breaks the very next day)
In the 80s the sky was the color of a dead TV channel and it was overcast.
In the 00s the sky was the color of a dead TV channel and it was clear.
Today nobody knows what a dead TV channel is supposed to look like.
Today dead channels are either blue or black with a floating "no signal" because the signal is not analog anymore
Honestly, given that TV viewership is falling and people are increasingly using on-demand services instead of tuning in, I'd argue that 404 error pages and NXDOMAIN browser error pages are in the process of replacing the dead channel conceptually.