From Sex and the City to Succession: will TV confront Covid or ignore it?
We’re not allowed to talk about it. That was a note from the channel,” says James Acaster in an outtake from the new series of Hypothetical. His co-host on the panel show, Josh Widdicombe, has just mentioned the Covid-19 pandemic. “Can’t say it,” says Acaster, “can’t reference it, can’t point out why we’re more spaced apart than usual.”
It’s a funny clip that Dave, the channel that makes Hypothetical, was happy to tweet out on its official account, but it highlights a dilemma that a lot of TV creatives are facing at the moment. Assuming Covid restrictions allow you to make your show in the first place, do you let the experience of life in the pandemic become a part of it?
“It’s not a case of absolutely not under any circumstances mentioning it,” insists Richard Watsham, director of commissioning at Dave’s parent company, UKTV. “It’s just about trying to minimise those mentions. When it comes to comedy and entertainment, I’ve always felt strongly that we were reflecting people’s need for escape.” That’s the crux of the problem: TV aims both to reflect reality back at us, and to offer us an escape from that reality. Covid has dominated our lives for nearly a year and it’s not disappearing any time soon. It is fairly easy for a non-topical panel game such as Hypothetical to forget it and have some abstract fun, but can comedies and dramas set in the present day keep ignoring it?
Some have concluded that they can’t. Sarah Jessica Parker alarmed many fans of Sex and the City last month when she announced Covid will “obviously be part of the storyline” in HBO’s forthcoming revival, because it concerns modern life in New York, and that life has changed. Similarly, the writers of the NBC sitcom Superstore (available on Netflix in the UK) felt that since their show, set in a Walmart/Target-esque “big box” store, deals with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, it was duty-bound to mirror how those experiences have been fundamentally altered. So when the sixth season began airing in October, Covid was foregrounded. The following month, ABC hospital drama Grey’s Anatomy returned for season 17, with its doctors facing a wave of Covid patients and central character Meredith Grey falling seriously ill.
When the writers of Grey’s convened in June last year to sketch the new season out, however, showrunner Krista Vernoff reportedly floated the idea that the show should ignore Covid altogether. In the end, Vernoff’s writers – many of whom are or were doctors – successfully countered that they couldn’t ignore the biggest medical story in recent history.
Not every show feels such a responsibility, however. Take Succession: a series that’s certainly of the moment, in that the caprices of our plutocratic media are as relevant as ever, but which hardly ever interacts with reality directly. In its second season, a brief glimpse of antifa protests was a rare brush with explicit topicality. Breakout star Sarah Snook recently told Variety that the pandemic won’t be tackled head-on in season three “because that’s not the show. We want to see the Roys doing the thing that they’ve been doing that we love.” Masks, vaccinations and lockdown measures are likely to be background noise at most.
“There really feels like significantly less need to mention it in drama,” says Watsham. “We’re all used to sitting down to a box set in an effort to inhabit another world for a little while. So I’m quite happy for our dramas not to reflect it.”
Nicola Shindler, chief executive of the Manchester-based Quay Street Productions, agrees. Her current ITV series, Finding Alice, was partly filmed after the arrival of Covid and could have acknowledged it, but takes place in a world without it. “My instinct is that, right now and for the short-term foreseeable future, viewers want to be taken away from unpleasant realities and reminded both of how life was and how it could be soon.”
Shindler is a big Sex and the City fan. If she were the showrunner, would she let Covid affect Carrie and the gang? “I would say no. That isn’t why I switch on to Sex and the City.”
Comedies without pretensions to social commentary have found bolder solutions. Mr Mayor, Tina Fey’s new sitcom about an LA politician, debuted in January and portrayed a post-Covid world in which it was breezily explained that Dolly Parton had bought everyone a vaccine. Curb Your Enthusiasm’s new season, coming this autumn, is set to pull a similar trick: Covid will exist, and Larry David will certainly have opinions on how his friends reacted to it, but it will be a past event that won’t loom large.
The genre where you might expect daily life to be portrayed most faithfully is UK soaps, but, even there, producers have been reluctant to let Covid take over. “Casualty and Holby City charted the impact of the pandemic on the wards,” says Yahoo! UK soaps columnist David Brown. “And when Emmerdale was cranking back into gear last year, there was a week of specials that depicted life in lockdown. Since the big soaps ramped back up to six episodes per week, though – or four in East-Enders’ case – things are hazier. We haven’t yet seen anyone succumb to the illness and die, outside of Casualty. Covid exists, but you’ve got the Queen Vic being open when pubs had closed, and people popping into each other’s homes when there was no household mixing in real life.”
Viewers do understand that soaps are filmed several weeks before broadcast, so they haven’t always reacted promptly to changes in lockdown rules. “What they’re less forgiving of,” says Brown, “is the sight of people on the ITV soaps coming into indoor spaces and removing masks to speak their lines. That seems like a topsy-turvy decision as we’re all masking up to enter shops. I’m guessing they want masks to be a part of this world without it impeding our ability to understand what actors are saying. But it does look odd.”
The producers of Superstore found that out the hard way. After filming several episodes with a rule in place that characters would wear masks whenever their real-life equivalents would, it was relaxed, simply on the grounds that it was hard to shoot and looked bad on screen. Perhaps the biggest problem with setting shows in a Covid world, however, was exemplified by a joke about Tiger King: by the time Superstore’s season premiere went out in October, the reference to a Netflix documentary people were watching during lockdown one in April felt ancient.
Now more than ever, content needs to be “evergreen”: a show, or even worse a single season of a long-running series, that features Covid will be uncomfortably jarring for the streaming viewers of the future. “We hope masks and social distancing won’t always be here,” says Shindler. “Shows [that include them] will instantly date.”
When UKTV’s Watsham issued his edict to Acaster and Widdicombe, he was more worried about the lag between filming and transmission, and the possibility of Covid having subsided before Hypothetical aired. His reasoning applies even more strongly to shows with a potentially endless future on streaming. “I imagined that point where we’re all starting to emerge from our hibernation. We’re back out on the streets and the sun is shining. We’re finally liberated from lockdown. Do we want to be reminded of it?”
When Sarah Pinborough’s thriller Behind Her Eyes was published in 2017, even she described it as a “Marmite book”. Her publisher slapped on equally dire warnings, hyping it with the hashtag #WTFthatending.
Now the novel is a hit Netflix miniseries and Pinborough is still boggled by her own twist. “I finished watching it and then I had a shower and went to bed and I was still thinking, ‘That ending, man!’ – and I made it up!” she says, speaking from her home near Milton Keynes. “But it’s different seeing it.”
Behind Her Eyes is the story of Louise, played by Simona Brown, a single mother who has a one-night stand with a man in a bar, only to discover that he is her new boss, David, played by Tom Bateman. Louise’s new friend Adele (Eve Hewson) also happens to be David’s wife. As Louise gets to know the couple, she sees the cracks in their marriage widen. So far, so run of the domestic noir mill. But Pinborough made her name in horror and science fiction before she turned to thrillers – so when the big reveal comes, Behind Her Eyes is genuinely #WTFthatending.
“I’d been reading a lot of books like Gone Girl, domestic noir and psychological thrillers, and I was really enjoying them. I thought I’d quite fancy writing something like that,” she says. “But I couldn’t come up with anything original.” At that point, Pinborough had written a couple of dozen novels – a mix of horror, science fiction and fantasy – and won a handful of awards, but none had become bestsellers. She remembers sitting in a bar during the sci-fi convention Worldcon, “watching people, and seeing writers who had just got big deals. It’s really dangerous to be envious of other people’s success, but I started to worry that maybe my shelf life was running out,” she says. “I’d written, like, 20 books and never broken through.”
She went for a beer with an editor at
HarperCollins, who told her she wasn’t being published right, and asked her to pitch a book. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be brilliant.’ Which obviously means it has to be brilliant,’” Pinborough says. “I was like, oh my god. A friend had died that week, and I was looking after someone’s dog, who I had to have put down. My brain was fried.”
She tried infusing her story with “flavour” – then, suddenly, she had the twist. “I wanted it to hit all the beats of a regular thriller. The clues had to be there,” she says. “At first I thought it was going to be really easy to write, but it was quite hard. Everything had to have dual meaning, so that no one could say this character lied. I would have hated that.”
Behind Her Eyes has now sold almost 1m copies around the world, and the Netflix adaptation is set to propel sales further still. Amazon reviews give an insight into its Marmite quality, ranging from five stars and “a wicked ending”, to “a good story ruined by a preposterous ending”.
Pinborough is sanguine about the reactions. “I don’t mind people who hate the book,” she smiles. “I’d rather they hate it than be indifferent. What I don’t like is when people say, ‘She didn’t know how to end this book, she tacked on this ending.’ I’m like, ‘Go back and read it again, do your homework!’”
Pinborough was head of English in a secondary school when she began writing horror novels. She submitted to a few publishers, “but no one was publishing horror – it was 2003 and there’d been a glut of novels called The Crabs or The Worms”. On her way back to the UK after getting married in Las Vegas, she picked up a paperback horror novel in the airport and sent her book to its publisher, Leisure Books in the US. They picked up her debut The Hidden, in which an amnesia victim begins seeing visions in her mirror warning her of “impending danger at the hands of a great evil”. She wrote five more books for Leisure.
“All the people who died in my books were kids in my school. They’d be like, ‘Can I die in one of your books?’ and I’d say, ‘You can die on page one’, or ‘You can die today before I even start the book’,” she says. “The pay was terrible – about £1,000 a book. But I was teaching and it was a learning curve – if I hadn’t written those books I probably wouldn’t have got my deal with HarperCollins.”
After six horror novels, Pinborough says she was fed up with the genre. She’d been offered the chance to write novelisations for the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood, and decided she could afford to take a six-month teaching break, rent out her London home and stay in a friend’s house in Scotland, where she would write the novel she actually wanted to write: “A kind of modern Paradise Lost retelling, a crime, dystopian story.” This became the DogFaced Gods trilogy, picked up by UK publisher Gollancz, who then gave her a three-book deal for a young adult trilogy, written under the name Sarah Silverwood.
Writing two books a year and renting out rooms in her house meant she could give up teaching. She wrote dark twists on fairytales, like Poison, a reimagining of Snow White – “I thought, what kind of man falls in love with a woman in a glass box?” – Charm, her take on Cinderella; and Beauty, a spin on Sleeping Beauty. Mayhem and Murder followed, two supernatural, historical murder mysteries that draw on the real-life Thames torso murders. Then came the meeting that led to Behind Her Eyes; she’s since written two more thrillers, of the same ilk: Cross Her Heart and Dead to Her. While she’s still enjoying the genre, she sounds like she’s starting to feel a little itchy.
“This whole pandemic has made a lot of people, including me, think about what they’re doing with their time and their world,” she says. “Five years ago, I would have said that the point of having money in the bank as a writer is so you can write what you want. You may take a knock in sales, but you can write what you want if you can afford not to care.”
She is refreshingly honest about the money. “I say this now – come back to me next year, it’ll be a different story,” she says, laughing. “But part of me thinks, I’ve got plenty of money in the bank because I haven’t gone and bought a big house, a flash car. When I was writing books for very little money, you can pitch your fairytales or historical horror. When someone’s paying you £10,000 a book, they don’t have to invest much in marketing to get their money back. When they’re investing quite heavily in you, it’s like, ‘No we really, really have to shift at least X amount of copies, so could you make it a little bit more commercial?’ I totally get that. But it does restrain your ideas a little.”
In addition to writing a new novel, Pinborough is also writing for film and television, including a film adaptation of her young adult novel 13 Minutes, which is due to start shooting in 2022. She is also in the writers’ room for an Amazon show, and has signed a deal to draft a Hollywood studio film.
“It’s a refreshing shift of direction from books, books, books – I’ve written 27 or 28 books now. I still love writing them, but I don’t want to be on that hamster wheel, writing a thriller a year for people who know exactly what they’re going to get,” she says, then hastens to add: “There are some people who are really skilled at writing very similar books but that’s just not me. So once I’ve finished this contract, I think I will evaluate, rather than panic. If a thriller idea comes, great. If it doesn’t, I’ll write something else.”
• Behind Her Eyes is on Netflix. The novel is published by HarperCollins (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
All the people who died in my books were kids in my school. They’d be like, ‘Can I die in one of your books?’