Um, hi.
I know, it’s been a while since the previous Blerd Vision column in November.
To be frank, a lot has gone down, and my energy had to go elsewhere. My mind was gone elsewhere: for survival, for health, for safety, for maintaining a household I barely leave. Fighting stress, fatigue, burnout, the chafing confines and increasing demands on time and spirit.
I had to get through the pandemic winter. More time indoors, lots of snow and cold, more death and isolation. A shifting job situation where duties have increased, all amid work to sustain a post-George Floyd push for diversity, equity and inclusion as it moves from passionate conversation to institutional change with momentum.
But things are looking up. Spring is here, vaccines are too, and the promise of shots in my arm lifts me from just doing time to thinking about the future again.
And as things reopen again, for better and for worse, safely and recklessly, my warm comfort of my geek TV is also returning.
After productions came to a screeching halt in spring 2020 and cut our TV seasons short, more and more shows and movies started to come back. Sort of. In fits and starts, with COVID-19 protocols and outbreaks, staggered production schedules, hotel-room bubbles and oh so many tests.
But make no mistake, the shows are coming back. Inventory was promised, and inventory must be made.
After a year of social distancing, mask wearing and virtual hangouts, it’s weird to watch full-faced people in crowded rooms. I watch Queen Latifah swan around a fancy cocktail party on The Equalizer and think, “No!! They told us we couldn’t do that!”
“Look at y’all, just breathing on each other like that. Tsk-tsk. I’ll never get to breathe on my friends again at this rate.”
I could use a disclaimer or two! Even if it doesn’t help my immediate reaction, the knowledge of a protocol or bubble in place acts as a backstop to my anxiety.
Hell’s Kitchen tripped all my alarms until I found out they shot this current season and the next back in 2019. So I can feel good about watching Gordon Ramsay yell in people’s faces! Whew. Relief. Well, some of that relief was taken away by the show moving to Las Vegas, which basically has acted like the pandemic’s not real anyway.
Credit to RuPaul’s Drag Race for creating an entire behind-the-scenes special about how they modified and carried out filming Season 13 during the pandemic. When I see the drag queens all in each other’s spaces applying makeup on each other and hugging, it helps to know they’ve been bubbled for weeks already. And you notice that Ru stands pretty damn far away from them all in the werk room.
I’ve also been interested in seeing what shows would acknowledge the pandemic, and how they would do it.
Despite this event affecting all of us and disrupting the entire world, did I necessarily want that reflected in the TV shows I’m watching? If a show doesn’t regularly tackle “issues,” for lack of a better word, should they bother? I grew up with the “very special episode” model in TV, too, and that’s largely gone from the current landscape.
Black-ish, which loves to get into issues-based comedy – albeit mainly from the POV of a middle-aged straight Black man, and all those blind spots – put in the very special COVID-19 episode. The Johnsons were isolated. Dre’s working from home. Jack and Diane are feeling the pressure and screen time drain. Junior is missing his outside-the-bubble girlfriend. And Rainbow, a medical doctor, goes through the wear, tear and despair working on the front lines.
The episode meant even more because Black-ish takes place in and near Los Angeles, as real-life news reports of the deteriorating, dire situation in LA continued to mount.
And then, next episode, the pandemic was mostly gone. Maybe I saw a mask or two? Dre was in the office. But they’d still mention the pandemic as if it were still happening. And then, nothing. For a show deeply invested in discussing racial equity, they missed an opportunity to do more about the disease disproportionately affecting Black people and other folks of color.
But hey, at least they gave it some serious consideration. On the other side, you could acknowledge it at such a bare minimum that it’s comical instead. I’m looking at you, Law & Order: SVU! Nothing like watching Olivia Benson stride righteously into a crime scene, masked up, and then rip that thing off to talk to an officer standing a foot away.
Superstore operates in the no man’s land of COVID storytelling. You’d think the pandemic would be the most fitting time to make a show about essential workers in a big-box store, and the show often flirts with Walmart-type labor issues. (Remember that whole season about the union?)
Their truncated final season sees a lot of up-front discussion about the pandemic, and there are masks and distancing rules in Cloud 9 stores. Yet a lot of the dialogue-heavy moments have the actors unmasked and within 6 feet of each other. Or a dozen-plus workers unmasked together in the break room! You know, basically the first level of hell during a pandemic.
I chalk this up to the vagaries of making the show function. How else are we supposed to read their faces? They treat it in the same way we’re supposed to accept that people on multi-camera sitcoms all sit together on one side of the table facing out to the camera and audience.
All Rise, however, tries to go hard with the in-universe COVID protocols as actors conduct themselves through plexiglass dividers, face shields and transparent masks.
But I also don’t mind if a show barely mentions the pandemic or doesn’t at all. Not every show can incorporate COVID.
Comedy has its work cut out for it.
Superstore found ways to play with COVID humor that was more about the social vagaries of it all. A cutaway gag of a shopper trying on a rack of face masks was both horrifying and hilarious. Or a scene where Glen and Dina have a heart-to-heart through masks, shake hands, and then Lysol their hands.
But it didn’t bother me at all for the screwball Mr. Mayor to quickly set up that Neil Bremer assumes the mayoralty of a post-pandemic Los Angeles. Otherwise, this show couldn’t be much of a comedy, because who has time for gags when the mayor is handling COVID and all its many economic and societal crises? That’s way beyond this show’s aims.
And as Batwoman, The Flash and Black Lightning returned, it was better to avoid the pandemic entirely. Keep those shows fantastical, even if they handle a bunch of other real-world issues.
Even though superheroes sometimes have had to handle contagions or villains possessing plaguelike powers, they’re better equipped to depict those things on an elevated scale. Flash’s villain Bloodwork, for example, infects people and turns them into zombies.
Or, in the case of Black Lightning, the show has enough dire things as it is. Why add a real-life pandemic to the Pierce family’s battles with Freeland’s joblessness and gang violence, or metahuman crackdowns, government conspiracies, and street war with Markovia?
WandaVision had so much ground to cover dealing with Scarlet Witch’s trauma that it didn’t leave enough room to further complete Monica Rambeau’s development, though Thanos’ snap draws some interesting parallels.
As Beth, Ruby and Annie begin their next schemes in Good Girls season 4, their struggles as secret criminals amid their webs of personal problems is more than enough drama.
On the flipside, Star Trek: Discovery has set itself up for a season 4 in which Michael Burnham and crew are about reconnecting the 32nd-century Federation of Planets now that warp power has been restored.
Reconnection and meaningful, face-to-face unity is sorely need in this real-life 2021.
