At the beginning of the pandemic, I became fascinated with how it would later be represented in pop culture. I was already thinking ahead. It was this collective trauma that seemed endless - any drama made at its height would age itself immediately. More to the point, did we even need a historical document depicting those nightmarish early days? It’s taken a while for the culture to come to grips with COVID in fiction, but sitting through Dumb Money, the comedy-drama about the 2021 GameStop shortage that had no choice but to incorporate the virus, I realised that the pandemic had finally found its place.
The journey has admittedly been rough. First came the short-sighted, reactive films - like 2020’s Songbird, starring KJ Apa, which was the first film to shoot in LA during the first lockdown. It merrily envisioned a future where the virus had violently mutated into COVID-23 (lol) and infected people were ghettoised into camps. Watching it in December 2020, I remember becoming legitimately depressed by its crass cynicism. Songbird was one side of a particularly bleak coin - the other was more kumbaya-focused fare filmed over Zoom like Coastal Elites or Hulu series Love in the Time of Corona, both of which sound like 30 Rock jokes. They only showed that we were still too deep in the throes of the pandemic to make anything approaching decent art out of it.
Then came the shoehorned-in references to COVID. The first ever sentence spoken in And Just Like That was literally “Remember when we had to legally stand six feet apart from one another”, a line that seemed clanging on first watch - COVID still felt like it would never pass - but now it’s like… so true, bestie. Remember when we had to legally stand six feet apart from one another? As ever, Carrie Bradshaw was right. Then there was The Morning Show, once unmoored in time, which suddenly dated itself by having Jennifer Aniston collapse, that episode’s cliffhanger revealing that she’d caught this newfangled illness named ‘Coronavirus’. COVID took us all by surprise so it became a fun little jump scare for screenwriters to insert but it added very little. Writing about the practicalities of COVID - the claustrophobia, the instability, fearing for older relatives, masking up - shockingly did not reveal hidden depths. There was no fresh perspective to be found. It was just our reality artlessly mirrored back at us.
