The Year TV Saved Us

As life outside our homes shut down, the small screen became our treasured path to a muchneeded safe escape

As life shut down, the small screen was an escape we all needed.

BACK IN MARCH, while my son and his friends were enjoying a chilly morning of socially distanced outdoor fun at a campground, all the dads lingered near the fire our kids had built. We spent a few minutes catching up on how we’d all been dealing with one year and counting of pandemic life. Then, the conversation turned to where it inevitably has since the lockdown began: television.

The other dads all seemed like genial suburbanites. Their face masks, though, hid not just droplets, but the desperate fiending of TV junkies who had gone too long since their last binge. They needed recommendations, and they needed them with greater speed and specificity than I could provide. “What about Ted Lasso?” I’d say, and they would twitch and sputter, “Seen it! What else you got?” Eventually, their eyes began to look so bloodshot and haunted, I worried that the day would turn into my own personal “Pine Barrens” from which I would not emerge — and not just because several of these men had, like so much of the world, used the pandemic as an excuse to finally watch The Sopranos.

Think back to those early days of quarantine. Every form of entertainment, escape, and distraction vanished one by one. First, live sports shut down. Then, concerts and theater. Going to the movies, assuming your state allowed it, was a game of Russian roulette. Whether you were a club-hopper or a museumgoer, options for getting out into the world, seeing and doing things, all ceased to exist.

But then there was television. Sweet, nourishing, unstoppable television. While all other sources of fun hit an extended pause, TV kept right on going, providing a lifeline to the outside world as we began months of sheltering in place. Our relationship with the medium has surely been fundamentally altered

by our time locked away from everything and everyone else. Even if we all respond to a post-vaccination world by becoming ferocious extroverts and reckless outdoorspeople, we’ll always have memories of our prolonged stay in front of the small screen during this nightmare, sometimes as the only comfort we could find.

The first quarantine sensation was Tiger King, a docuseries that dropped on Netflix exactly about a week after the quarantine began. A lurid true-crime story involving exotic animals (some of them managed by a guy who called himself Joe Exotic), fluid sexuality, country music, and a murder-for-hire plot, it provided an early outlet for people who wanted a surreal, cracked-mirror reflection of our world rather than the terrifying version they could glimpse outside their windows. It was also an ethical and journalistic quagmire, even more so than the next big lockdown hit, The Last Dance. A 10-part hagiography of Michael Jordan, the ESPN miniseries offered deep archival footage and salty, self-aggrandizing quotes from the man himself that overwhelmed any qualms about the filmmakers letting their subject (who also had an executive role via his production company) steer the story. Both series became instantly meme-worthy, with screenshots of Jordan saying “And I took that personally” dominating social media for much of the spring and summer.

Soon enough, our hunger for outsize figures having the kinds of adventures we couldn’t expanded to scripted television. Disney+ made the idea of weekly episode releases cool again with the second season of The Mandalorian and, a few months later, the debut of WandaVision. While both are part of insanely popular movie franchises ( Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, respectively), the series took clever advantage of the TV format — WandaVision in particular, since its episodes often played as fantasy versions of classic sitcoms. The steady stream of episodes kept people talking as if they were the ones getting to travel to a galaxy far, far away with Mando and Baby Yoda (Grogu to his friends), or to magically become Wanda’s new wacky neighbor. That hunt for a weekly, largerthan-life fix could sometimes backfire — millions howled in indignation at the stultifying end of HBO’s Nicole Kidman/Hugh Grant thriller miniseries The Undoing (“Why is she in a helicopter now?!”) — but there was still something rewarding about putting in the effort to stick with a story the old-school way.

Of course shows whose episodes arrived all at once still captured our fancy if the characters were colorful enough. If they were English, all the better. The fourth season of The Crown finally reached the modern era of the monarchy, diving into the tabloid-friendly story of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s tumultuous marriage. Meanwhile Bridgerton,

an energetic Regency romance and the first Netflix series from superproducer Shonda Rhimes, was a frothy bodice-ripper come to life. Audiences ate them both up like a Sunday trifle. (Even British actors playing American could prove addictive, as chess sales boomed in the aftermath of Londoner Anya Taylor-Joy’s mesmerizing star turn as a teen prodigy in The Queen’s Gambit.) And from just across the Irish Sea came Normal People, the Hulu adaptation of author Salley Rooney’s tale of messy, hot-and-heavy love between two young millennials in Dublin, which suddenly had audiences appreciating sensuous sound design.

Shows that mined the darker side of life pulled us in, too. As the pain and fear of quarantine began to overlap with the world exploding in social-justice protests, several dramas arrived feeling as if they had been created for this precise moment of rage. HBO’s Lovecraft Country (a genre mash-up about a Fifties black family battling monsters both real and supernatural) and Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird (with a fire-breathing, improbably hilarious Ethan Hawke as abolitionist John Brown) delved into historical racist horrors, while I May Destroy You (also HBO) presented a riveting exploration of sexual assault, consent, and healing.

As it became obvious that we would be indoors for the long haul, many sought refuge from the depressing state of the world by turning to shows about nice people. Apple TV+ had its first word-of-mouth hit with Ted Lasso, starring Jason Sudeikis as an unqualified English Premier League coach surprising everyone with an almost superhuman level of kindness. The final season of the heartwarming Pop TV sitcom Schitt’s Creek

prompted a new wave of viewers to binge the entire series, about a spoiled, rich family forced to grow up after losing everything but one another. And the remake of All Creatures Great and Small — a gentle drama about a polite veterinarian in the English countryside of the Thirties — arrived on PBS only days after the Capitol insurrection in January, providing blessed relief in its world full of good people and cute animals.

Niceness also fueled one of the quarantine’s first viral hits: Some Good News, a web series hosted by John Krasinski that attempted to live up to its title while bringing in his many celebrity friends. (The show became almost too popular, as vocal fans seemed betrayed when the seemingly DIY project was sold to CBS.) In one episode, Krasinski presided over a virtual wedding for a pair of Office superfans, then surprised them with a video montage of all his old castmates performing the dance from Jim and Pam’s ceremony. It was far from the only cast reunion meant to raise spirits and charitable donations, whether the actors were performing new material set in Covid times (as both Monk and Parks and Recreation did), or simply jumping on Zoom together to reminisce about the good old days.

The pandemic postponed perhaps the most-anticipated reunion of all, as HBO Max was set to launch with the six Friends stars gathered around the old Central Perk couch. Instead, the streamer had to premiere Phoebe-less (and later did West Wing and

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reunions), entering an increasingly crowded field that also saw Peacock, Paramount+, and Discovery+ debut in lockdown. (Pour one out for Quibi, a streamer meant to provide short videos for people on the go, only to arrive in a world where no one was going anywhere.) In the before times, the sheer tonnage of new shows and new places to see them could feel oppressive. Now, it felt miraculous: absurd abundance in what was otherwise a time of great entertainment famine. As high-profile movies like Wonder Woman 1984, Zack Snyder’s four-hour new version of Justice League, or Steve McQueen’s collection of Small Axe films were released directly to streaming, it began to feel like everything was becoming television.

The streaming explosion also made it easier than ever for people to finally cross off classic shows on their bucket lists. Nostalgia — whether for shows we’d already watched in better days, or older ones we’d been hearing about forever without having the time to get around to them — transformed streamers’ library titles from afterthought to essential. The Sopranos in particular had another cultural moment, as millennials and Gen Z found themselves drawn to the parent series of modern television, finding something painfully recognizable in a show whose protagonist was convinced the best in life was over and all that lay ahead was ruin.

Relatively speaking, there have been better overall stretches of Peak TV than the one that carried us through Covid. And with the prepandemic backlog long since exhausted, the relentless pace and volume of new content has dropped precipitously in recent months. (You’ll have to wait a good while longer for that Game of Thrones spinoff or new seasons of Atlanta, among many others.) That’s OK, though. After two decades of

The Wire, Breaking Bad, Fleabag, and more, nobody needs to be told that TV can be as great as movies, theater, or any other form of art. But where the medium was once derided for playing never-hard-to-get — always on, available at any hour of the day — that ubiquity became the thing we all latched onto to stay safe and sane when the rest of the world turned off. Thanks, TV. We really, really needed you.

Shows that mined the darker side of life pulled us in, too. As the pain and fear of quarantine began to overlap with the world exploding in socialjustice protests, several dramas arrived feeling as if they had been created for this precise moment of rage.

It was the monoculture all along. Marvel’s instant-classic WandaVision debuted on Disney+ on January 15th, timed perfectly for a pandemicpummeled nation fresh off an assault on its Capitol so outlandish it could’ve been pulled from MCU outtakes. When we needed it most, the series was a turducken of cultural comfort food, a loving tribute to the history of sitcoms, with supernatural mystery and superheroics bubbling underneath: “A combination of Nick at Nite and Marvel,” in the words of director Matt Shakman, driven by themes of grief and loss that fit the era all too well. ▶ With Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany reprising their movie roles as fiction’s only witch-synthezoid couple (Wanda Maximoff and Vision), the show was also the first Marvel TV venture to fully connect with the studio’s culture-conquering movies (not to mention the first MCU project, after a lengthy break, since 2019’s SpiderMan: Far From Home). In a major vindication of Disney’s retro, antiNetflix, once-a-week release schedule, WandaVision topped streaming charts — everyone was watching. Here’s a look at how they pulled it off.

The Beginning

The show started with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige’s attempts to ease his stress while Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame were filming simultaneously in Atlanta. He discovered a local TV station that showed old sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons, and “found it so soothing,” he says. “The way those people had a problem and got it figured out, you think, ‘Everything will be OK today.’ ” Feige says he became fascinated with the idea of playing with the medium and that genre, “in a way that could both subvert what we do at Marvel and subvert what those shows were.”

That notion of the “false comfort” TV brings, combined with his affection for a 2017 Vision comic-book series that showed the character in suburbia and a general desire to see more of the Wanda and Vision characters, whose love story is on the fringes of the movies, all coalesced in Feige’s mind. (The fact that Vision died in Infinity War was little impediment.) When Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger told Feige about the new streaming service that would require a slate of Marvel shows, “I thought, ‘Oh, we could actually turn this into something.’ ”

Mary Livanos, a comics-savvy Marvel development exec, solicited a pitch from Jac Schaeffer, a screenwriter who had contributed to 2019’s Captain Marvel

and the upcoming Black Widow

movie. Feige had already come up with the idea that Wanda might hide out in a self-created sitcom world to process her vast grief — she had lost both her lover and her brother, after being orphaned as a child. But Schaeffer cracked the structure, including the idea of basing the story around the stages of grief, which perfectly dovetailed with the concept of dedicating an episode to each decade of sitcom styles: Who was more in denial than the suburban characters of Fifties TV?

Schaeffer wanted the reality of the shows within the show to fray around the edges, while disorienting viewers with clues and red herrings. The entire time, she was also chasing the vertiginous feeling of watching a “very special episode” of an Eighties sitcom as a kid — the ones where the benign surface was shattered by horrific events. The most infamous may be the Growing Pains

episode where Carol Seaver’s boyfriend dies after a drunk-driving accident. “With a sitcom, the creators make a pact with the audience: You’re in a safe space,” says Schaeffer. “Those episodes violate that agreement. On Growing Pains, it was such a betrayal, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do! I want to violate our agreement with the audience and give them that freaky sick feeling.’ ”

The Actors

When Elizabeth Olsen learned she had to play versions of her character inside various sitcom decades — including a first episode shot in front of an actual live studio audience — her reaction was, “This is going to be so hard.” She also realized just how completely the show would be built around her performance. She ended up drawing on parts of her acting training she’d never used professionally, going back to a slapstick-comedy class she’d taken in college, and even to musical-theater camp in elementary school: For each sitcom scene, Olsen and Kathryn Hahn (brassy neighbor Agatha Harkness) would do a campy vocal warm-up together, “because people in sitcoms in those decades used so much more of their vocal range.”

Meanwhile, Olsen had multiple scenes where she had to express monumentally dark emotions while also miming superpowers — her specialty in the movies. “I’m in a harness, floating on a wire while I’m wailing,” she says. “I really feel like I have figured out how to have those big, emotional moments and not be too uncomfortable with the fact [that] there’s, like, 300 people doing their job around me.”

For Paul Bettany, playing a version of Vision re-created by Wanda reminded him of the part he played in A Beautiful Mind, as an imaginary best friend. “She has made him the perfect fit,” he says. Which also, come to think of it, reminds him of Weird Science, the 1985 film in which nerdy teens create the “perfect woman.” (“I’m Kelly LeBrock in this situation!”) He was delighted to play the alternate, bleached-out, emotionless version of the Vision, a concept borrowed from the comic books. “It was something Kevin and I talked about over the years,” he says.

The series’ most notable Marvel newcomers, Hahn and Teyonah Parris (who plays the destined-to-be-a-superhero Monica Rambeau, previously seen as a child in Captain Marvel), are a bit dazed from the show’s success. When Parris saw storyboards with her face on them, she wept so profusely that she had to excuse herself from a Marvel conference room. She thought hard about her character’s place in the Marvel universe, and the sitcom universe within it (where her character is known as Geraldine). “I felt Monica would pull from someone like a Willona from

Good Times,” she says. “And if you’re going to go through the decades of American sitcoms, and you have people of color, you have to acknowledge where they were

not in that space. That character didn’t belong in that Brady Bunch world. And then you have Geraldine, who doesn’t belong in Wanda’s fake world.”

Hahn, despite a long, successful career, says, “I’ve never been a part of anything this big.” And she delighted in the part of a devious, murderous, yet oddly likable ancient witch. “I just love the idea of a dangerous woman,” she says. She also got to sing Agatha’s iTunes-topping theme song, “Agatha All Along,” written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, of Frozen fame. “When I heard the demo, I thought of The Munsters,” says Hahn. “Kristen was like, ‘Let’s pretend you’re doing karaoke. I’m just gonna say, like, Pat Benatar or Heart or whatever.’ It was half an hour of just joy.”

The Ending

Some viewers felt that — after forcing an entire town into her fantasy world — Olsen’s character got off too easy when she flew away without punishment. But the actress says they were missing the context. “She had to get away before the people who have to hold her accountable got there,” she says. “She went where no one could find her. I think she has a tremendous amount of guilt.”

Wanda’s story will continue in 2022’s Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, but the two projects were almost linked much more directly. Marvel actually struck a deal with Benedict Cumberbatch to appear as Dr. Strange in the final episode of WandaVision, but wrote him out late in the process. (Originally, the in-universe commercials were intended as messages from Strange to Wanda.) “Some people might say, ‘Oh, it would’ve been so cool to see Dr. Strange,’ ” says Feige. “But it would have taken away from Wanda. We didn’t want the end of the show to be commoditized to go to the next movie — here’s the white guy, ‘Let me show you how power works.’ ” That meant the Dr. Strange movie, too, had to be rewritten. In the end, Feige says, Marvel’s process is “a wonderful combination of very dedicated coordination, and chaos. Chaos magic.”