The weight of COVID-19 has touched every aspect of human behaviour, up to and including the way we make TV shows. And it’s not just a question of how a given show is produced, but whether that show will even acknowledge the pandemic affecting its production.

Some series are incorporating the coronavirus into their narratives—NBC’s Superstore and the Vancouver-filmed The Good Doctor (which continued shooting while two cast members tested positive in real life), ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy—while others, like CBS comedy The Unicorn, aren’t acknowledging it but just happen to have a lot more scenes taking place outdoors this year.

Still other programs were commissioned specifically to deal with the pandemic. And over the course of 2020, I wound up watching all of them.

Isolation Stories

The first one, which made to Canada in June on the Britbox service, was Isolation Stories, a quartet of short dramas about people sheltering in place all over the U.K. Written and produced before anyone really understood what the shape of the pandemic was going to be, it’s a fascinating exercise in making drama with the tools on hand: episodes were shot in the actors’ own homes (with cameras operated by themselves or their families), and two of them feature actual parents and children playing out fictionalized versions of their own relationships.

But more to the point, they work as dramatic narratives, capturing the fear and anxiety swirling through the general public as a still-abstract threat disrupts their lives. Remember those first weeks, when no one quite knew what was coming next? Isolation Stories does an excellent job of capturing that moment.

Coastal Elites

Next came Coastal Elites, an HBO special event in September structured as five monologues from Americans in early 2020. Bette Midler, Dan Levy, Issa Rae, Sarah Paulson, and Kaitlyn Dever speak directly to the camera, relating stories of mounting red state/blue state tension, and the extremes to which they all feel they’re being pushed. COVID-19 is barely a factor—the pandemic is just another stressor on pre-existing fractures—until it comes down hard in the final segment, with Dever playing a young nurse from the heartland who’s been brought in as additional support in a Manhattan hospital.

Paul Rudnick’s feels very theatrical, its spare sensibility underscored by Jay Roach’s locked-down cameras fixed tightly on the isolated performers. And with the exception of a couple of carefully manicured locations, Coastal Elites looks and feels like the 2020 we know: people alone in rooms, trying to figure out what to do with themselves.

Connecting…

That was the appeal of Connecting…, an unfortunately short-lived NBC sitcom from Canadian Blindspot showrunners Martin Gero and Brendan Gall about seven friends in Los Angeles leaning on each other to get through the pandemic. Casually diverse in its casting and really clever about how it employed its laptop-cam aesthetic to enhance punchlines, prolong comic reactions, and extend uncomfortable silences, it was also willing to acknowledge the economic disparities between its characters—and how money and status affected every single decision about the pandemic.

(An early episode featured a subplot about Shakina Nayfack’s Ellis, who is trans, trying to figure out how she’s going to pay for her hormones after COVID shuts down her workplace.)

Gero and Gall also made a point of anchoring its storyline to real-life developments, ending one episode with the release of the George Floyd video and starting the next with the show’s Black characters trying to get through a day while managing both their own rage and their friends’ well-intentioned questions about the Black Lives Matter movement.

But we never got to find out what happened next; the show was cancelled after just four episodes, under the theory that people just didn’t want to be reminded of the pandemic they were currently living through. It’s a shame; I think Connecting… really had something.

Social Distance

And then there was Hilary Weisman Graham’s Netflix series Social Distance, which threaded the needle between the lockdown drama of Isolation Stories and the visual gimmick of Connecting…: each of its 20-minute episodes tells a story through Zoom calls, FaceTime conversations, Wyze security footage, laptop screens, and whatever else is available, letting us in on the personal crises playing out against the larger backdrop of a global plague. Several of the episodes focus on parents trying to shepherd young children through a world neither grown-ups nor kids can fully comprehend; one standout features Luke Cage’s Mike Colter as a recovering alcoholic struggling with being alone for the unknown duration of lockdown.

And as with Connecting…, the show’s final episodes find those personal crises derailed by the shock of George Floyd’s death at the hands of those Minneapolis police officers, forcing the characters—and the show—to acknowledge the world we’re all living in.

How To With John Wilson

Finally, there was the cheerful HBO series How To With John Wilson, which ended its six-episode first season with an episode that saw Wilson’s quixotic attempts to cook risotto for his elderly landlady derailed by the arrival of COVID-19 in New York City.

It’s an unsettling disruption of an otherwise gentle, charming documentary series, which had enthralled me with its willingness to follow some very strange tangents but wasn’t prepared for the level of dread that rolls into everyone’s lives. The already obsessive Wilson starts worrying about bringing a highly contagious virus home to this fragile old woman who cooks for him, insists on doing his laundry and invites him down to her apartment to watch Jeopardy! every night.

Somehow, though, kindness prevails. The episode ends on a note of decency and hope, offering a season-spanning montage of New Yorkers helping each other out, The news this week that HBO has ordered a second season of How To gives me hope, too; we can look forward to the pandemic’s end, and to Wilson capturing what that looks and feels like. You know, for future reference.