BUILD A BRIDGE AND GET OVER IT
Wondering when the pandemic will end? On TV, it already has
Sex And The City always existed in a fantasy version of New York City, but in its HBO Go sequel And Just Like That..., there’s a different sort of illusion at work. In the opening scene, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) are waiting for a table at a very crowded, very indoor restaurant.
“Remember when we legally had to stand 6 feet apart from one another?” Carrie quips.
And just like that… Covid is over. At least it is in this show’s Manhattan, as well as in a cohort of other series that try, wishfully, to press the epidemiological fast-forward button.
In the real world, the Omicron variant may be driving case counts into the stratosphere, but on TV, the pandemic is playing dead. In the Season 11 premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s HBO comedy of ill manners, chaos breaks out during a party (specifically, a premature funeral) at Albert Brooks’ house when Larry finds a closet stuffed with Purell, toilet paper and KN95 masks, exposing the Lost In America director as having been a “Covid hoarder”.
You know — during the pandemic. The one that is definitely over.
For nearly two years now, representing (or avoiding) Covid on TV has been a choice among bad options. Most shows ignored it altogether. A few, like Social Distance on Netflix, made the pandemic a direct subject, earnestly if clunkily.
But maybe most awkward have been the series that acknowledged Covid existed but declared or implied it was over long before Covid decided it was over. NBC’s time-skipping This Is Us
played the pandemic’s greatest hits throughout Season 5 — quarantine, video calls, pandemic unemployment — but this week’s Season 6 premiere suggests that the show has moved on. Season 2 of HBO Go’s Love Life, a story that spans several years, includes one pandemic episode, then begins the next in a version of 2021 in which an audience is sitting unmasked in New York’s La MaMa theatre.
Some prime-time series about doctors, police and other emergency workers made fitful efforts to depict Covid, but their mask discipline sagged over time. Grey’s Anatomy, for instance, brought the pandemic full-on to Seattle Grace hospital in autumn of 2020. By autumn of 2021, it opened with the disclaimer that it now “portrays a fictional, post-pandemic world which represents our hopes for the future”.
These are all understandable choices and maybe the only creatively practical ones. But they make for some potent cognitive dissonance. When I watched a “post-pandemic” Grey’s episode recently on Hulu, it opened with a preroll ad urging me to get a booster shot.
For programmes that simply try to show how people live daily life, the pandemic’s challenges are both subtler and more pervasive than those presented by past catastrophes. After 9/11, there was no need for homeland-security alerts to impinge on Friends, and the subsequent fixation on terrorism was even a natural driver of plot for action thrillers.
The pandemic, on the other hand, quelled action. Covid touched every aspect of mundane life. Masks limited facial expression. Real-life distancing practices meant that the basic engine of sitcoms — people in a room or a bar or an office, talking — was now fraught with angst.
Very occasionally, series have managed to capture this reality, as in the second and final season of HBO’s naturalistic comedy Betty, whose young characters skateboarded through pandemic-era New York in various states of matter-of-fact maskedness.
The remake of Scenes From A Marriage split the difference oddly, opening with the fourth-wall-breaking image of the cast and crew working under Covid protocols, then letting its domestic dissolution play out sans masks.
More often, TV has breezed past the situation or wished it away. As long as a year ago, series were declaring early victory over Covid. NBC’s Mr. Mayor, which premiered last January, starred Ted Danson as the mayor of Los Angeles, a job in which managing public health is not a small detail. The pilot yada-yadas the pandemic away by having him mention that “Dolly Parton bought everyone the vaccine”. (A later episode does involve a lice outbreak.)
To its credit, a series such as And Just Like That is at least trying to acknowledge the pandemic, rather than shunt it off screen. It just does so in the past tense.
The Peloton on which Mr. Big (Chris Noth) takes his fateful last ride was a habit many other shut-ins of a certain income acquired during lockdown, which was also when he and Carrie began their evening ritual of listening to vinyl LPs. Anthony (Mario Cantone) runs a bakery, the offshoot of one more Covid-acquired sourdough hobby. And when Carrie calls Miranda out for her drinking in a recent episode, Miranda shoots back: “I am drinking too much. Yes. We all were in the pandemic, and I guess I just kept going.” Make mine a double.
South Park, which released a twomovie “Post Covid” special on Paramount+ in November and December, has one of the quickest turnaround times in TV — the first instalment was released just as Omicron was discovered, and the second worked in a reference to the variant. But it put the “post” in its “Post Covid” premise by using time travel and alternative reality to depict a future in which humanity had — well, almost — beaten the virus. (Maybe the most farfetched twist is its resolution, in which, with the series’ frustrating both-sidesing, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers shower each other with apologies for getting so worked up during the plague years.)
Maybe it’s only fitting that TV producers should muddle through this garbage storm like everyone else, unsure what the rules will be by airtime, wishing they knew where the pandemic fell on the spectrum between temporary emergency and permanent way of life. And I’m sure plenty of viewers would rather be reminded of anything else.
But you’re reminded anyway, if only by the twinge of uncanniness from seeing TV characters act as if the pandemic were history, even as you’re still trying to get your hands on rapid antigen tests. I bet Albert Brooks has a ton of them.