Melding TV, internet proves to be hit or miss
Stars on Zoom, improvised efforts can’t match traditional tube’s vigour
Television has never looked more like our own lives than it does in this endless lockdown, where work and school and daily existence have all become improvised efforts. Every program that once depended on a studio audience and other forms of frisson (an interview, a rapport, anything resembling the human touch) has reinvented itself to remain relevant, or just to remain on.
Hosts, actors, pundits and all those many people famous for being famous are now having to sing for their suppers — often by literally singing: the Sondheim tribute! The Disney Family Singalong! One World: Together At Home — imagine all the people, banging on their pans.
A nation and its TV culture are united in spirit and disunited by stuttering wireless signals, in a conspicuous and continual demonstration of heroic degrees of isolation. TV provided the pure oxygen to the celebrity class that the internet can only approximate. The two mediums merged to provide emergency respiration, in the form of the now-ubiquitous Zoom display or an otherwise juryrigged home studio setup.
The commercials, meanwhile, dropped their overt sales pitches to instead remind us how much they truly care, a stab at authenticity that initially seemed responsive and thoughtful (Walmart employees singing Lean on Me a cappella) and then became redundant, even bathetic.
At first, TV’s improvised solutions provided an intriguing aspect of the coronavirus pandemic — the rare opportunity for viewers to watch the creative class snap into action and come up with some notable workarounds.
NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which is so often looked to for its reassuring grip on the cultural and political zeitgeist, emerged April 11 as SNL At Home, replacing its live energy with pre-recorded, unadorned sketches and other short bits that both acknowledged and parodied the shared sense of internet-only confinement.
The experimental effort was a renewal of faith in one of SNL’s founding principles — the low-stakes magic of improv comedy and the notion that there is great reward in the pretty-good try. Liberated from its usual ideas and setups, SNL delivered one of its most intriguing (not the same as funniest) episodes in years.
For a moment, it felt like a glimpse into what the series might look like in the inevitably approaching era of After Lorne — an SNL stripped of decades-long rules, conventions and ironclad sensibilities. Sad to say, the SNL At Home episode that aired two weeks later, on April 25, had ironed out those appealing wrinkles, delivering a more polished episode that resembled the usual show. The pandemic was still Topic A, but the sketches about it had fitted to the format, instead of the other way around.
On that same Saturday night, MTV carried out a painful experiment in resurrecting its old Club MTV dance show from the 1980s and ’90s — this time as a live, virtual dance party. It might have worked better as an SNL sketch.
The melding of TV and the internet is not as exciting as the futurists once promised. Rather than interactive, it feels interpassive. As the novelty wears off, the technology turns out to be a lousy substitute for conversation, intimacy, love — the things that are truly worth watching.
Life is noticeably more different over at Jimmy Fallon’s eclectically decorated homestead, which includes a restored barn where a playful indoor slide connects one floor to another. The hyperactive NBC Tonight Show host, who built his persona as a giddily regressive extrovert, has discovered his calmer and more attentive side, at long last. It’s the more subdued presence of a grown-up — a father and husband trying to break some of the household monotony.
The breakout star on this version of the show is Fallon’s pleasantly chillaxed wife of 12-plus years, Nancy Juvonen, who is now The Tonight Show’s chief phone-camera operator and front-line producer. In a new and refreshingly tranquil recurring segment, Fallon and Juvonen take a walk around their pretty neighbourhood and answer viewers’ questions (sent via hashtag), mostly about their relationship,
Might a new kind of Tonight Show emerge from this? A quieter, nightly wind-down instead of the frenetic, high-decibel, celebrity recess playground it had become?
That’s probably just one critic’s wishful thinking.
TV’s standouts in the coronavirus era, so far, are few. The sentimental reunion of NBC’s beloved Parks and Recreation cast for a special episode, told entirely in a Zoom-like conversational format, became an instant classic of the era. CBS’s courtroom drama All Rise is trying a similar approach as a legal procedural reduced to internet connections — for what else can a show do right now but simply try?
Criticism is about as welcome as it would be at an elementary school talent show. If one senses there might have been something a little too facile in the way the Parks and Rec special had everyone on Twitter bleary with tears — well, friends, it’s a lonely time to be a crab.