‘The country will need Strictly!’: what will TV look like after coronavirus?

On the face of it, the two early TV hits of lockdown didn’t have much in common. There was Netflix’s Tiger King, taking us on a bizarre journey into the dark underbelly of American big cat breeding. And there was ITV’s Quiz, an entertaining dramatisation of a small-screen oddity from our recent past. Perhaps all they shared was how little they had to say about our current situation. They hit a sweet spot of cultural nostalgia and detachment from reality. Both were too singular in terms of content to have much wider resonance, and, as we adjusted to a scary and unfamiliar new paradigm, that was just the ticket.

There’s an odd moment in Quiz when, at the height of what’s essentially a fantastically trivial tale about possible cheating on a TV gameshow, 9/11 happens. To anyone watching the drama as the Covid-19 death toll mounted, this felt jarringly familiar. Here was real life, poking its nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Couldn’t we even have an hour’s worth of respite from terrifying global events? Apparently not. And this implied a question. The practical challenges presented to the television industry by the Covid-19 pandemic are self-evident. But what about the creative, emotional challenges? What kind of TV will viewers want once the cameras start rolling again?

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Nostalgia is frequently the Very British response to challenging times. In 1981, as riots convulsed the nation, we hid in a country house as the genteel Evelyn Waugh adaptation Brideshead Revisited was showered with Baftas and Golden Globes. In 2010, with austerity looming, Downton Abbey fulfilled a similar function. But the Covid-19 pandemic feels different: an open-ended battle against a faceless adversary. And lockdown has already felt like a nostalgia-laden experience. How many of us have revisited box sets, immersed ourselves in 30-year-old football matches, or compiled social media lists of formative cultural experiences? Surely, soon we’ll be in the mood for something new?

Dan Hassler-Forest is assistant professor of cultural theory and transmedia practice at Utrecht University. He has also written extensively on the interplay between culture and politics. He is cautiously excited about the post-lockdown possibilities. “It’s going to be an exciting time in terms of both media and politics,” he says. “Maybe we got a chance to be nostalgic until we were sick of it? Do we develop nostalgia for the pre-coronavirus recent past? Or are we brave enough to say that that kind of society was nice for a privileged group but not for everybody?”

In short, how much of our old world will we even want to recreate? Already, Covid-19 has trumped a whole host of overfamiliar TV tropes. What price a new conspiracy drama in a post-virus world? It’s telling that the genre really took hold in the 1990s with shows such as The X-Files offering speculative fun during a comparatively tranquil era in real-life current affairs. In 2020, such adventurous speculation may not be quite so welcome – or feel quite so harmless. “The wildest theories proliferate so quickly now,” says Hassler-Forest. “It’s really hard for a screenwriter to keep up in terms of creating something more outrageous than these batshit theories about 5G or Bill Gates. It’s straight out of 1970s science fiction and it might not be interesting as entertainment if it’s part of our daily lives.”

So what kind of entertainment might offer solace? In terms of serious drama, there’s increasingly an atmosphere of caution. Charlie Brooker has spoken of “revisiting his comic skillset”, and in a recent interview with the Radio Times wondered whether there’d really be much appetite for a new series of Black Mirror. ITV, meanwhile, has delayed the broadcast of Honour, a dark drama about so-called “honour” killings starring Keeley Hawes. As Kieron Butler, a course leader in television production at Solent University puts it, by autumn “the country will need Strictly Come Dancing!” A certain degree of emotional consolidation might be in order. There’ll certainly be a yearning for warmth and familiarity.

“I’d think a response to something like this would be much more along the lines of small, comforting, human television,” says Hassler-Forest. “One thing we might look back upon as an early precedent is the reunion episode of Parks and Recreation, which was done from isolation. It’s about little moments of human connection, reminding each other to take care of ourselves, resorting to a sense of small-town community and maybe taking a bit of television’s old form as a cultural forum where we discuss contemporary issues rather than flee into fantasy.”

This process is happening in the UK, too. Butler speaks admiringly of ITV’s Isolation Stories, which he describes as “miraculous inside 45 days”. He’s confident that necessity will prove to be the mother of invention. Isolation and social distancing is provoking lateral thinking. Some of it will be inevitably daft. Like Snoop Dogs, a magnificently absurd-sounding Channel 4 update of Through the Keyhole, featuring inquisitive dogs equipped with GoPro cameras in the Loyd Grossman role. “What a brilliant response!” says Butler. “Of course it’s ridiculous, but so was The Masked Singer.” Although whether Zoom will have shown us enough of the insides of celebrities’ homes by the time of broadcast remains to be seen.

The omnipresence of the Zoom conversation has interesting implications. Butler points out that the “direct address to the audience, that use of low-tech that we use to communicate with each other, is becoming more acceptable on television. Lockdown dramas are informed by the pandemic but the style is written into their fabric.” The visual grammar shares common ground with various forms of reality TV, too: what was Channel 4’s The Circle, for example, if not a prototype lockdown drama? Might long experience of confinement and “diary room”-style video communication with each other make us slightly wary of such small-screen entertainment once we reach the other side of Covid-19?

Often crises simply accelerate developments that were already under way. It’s not impossible that a combination of empty primetime slots and talented outsiders with time on their hands might lead to a happy coincidence of fresh ideas and opportunity. Hassler-Forest cites the “tremendous skill” evident in video narratives constructed for online platforms.

“We are seeing huge creativity from people who are isolated with their parents” he says. “Teenagers making 30-minute movies, basically. Very few of my students even watch much television. Most of the time they’re on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube. So we might be looking at the wrong thing if we’re still thinking about what television is going to be like in terms of responding to this.”

It’s possible these developments might also dovetail with “lockdown brain”, the reduced attention span that, anecdotally, seems to be a product of lockdown. Might we gravitate towards shorter, speedier entertainments with so much else weighing on our minds?

Nevertheless, more traditional responses will still be called for. Grand statements will be required in respect of a crisis too all-consuming for television to avoid staring it in the face. As was the case around the time of 9/11, variations on the phrase “it’s just like a movie” have become a cliche. But cliches are cliches for a reason: there is a sense that, from zombie dramas to post-apocalyptic thrillers, television and film have been preparing us for a cataclysm like this. Yet now, they seem somewhat inadequate. “It’s like we’d already been told exactly what was going to happen and now it’s happening,” says Hassler-Forest. “Albeit in a slightly different, slightly more tedious form. It’s familiar but it’s less exciting than a zombie apocalypse.”

But will Covid-19 have to be incorporated into the fabric of our favourite shows? Will Succession’s feuds now be conducted through face masks, at two metres’ remove? If the possibility sounds strange, the fact remains that the pandemic is potentially too transformative not to acknowledge. Also, as Hassler-Forest points out, “people will be eager to incorporate ideas and motifs that resonate with our recent experience. And watching any film and television today, it’s striking how attentive you are to how close people are to each other.” If social distancing is indeed our new normal, it’s hard to see how television can avoid reflecting it.

The search for deeper meaning will matter too. Back in 2001, The West Wing famously cobbled together a trite, sanctimonious response to the attacks in which characters lectured students (and by extension, viewers) about terrorism. But really, it was Jack Bauer who caught the mood. The first season of 24 was filmed before (but broadcast after) the Twin Towers fell. But subsequent seasons were happy to accommodate a newly bellicose yet paranoid tone. Various studies after 9/11 showed that psychological recovery from this national trauma was easier for people who felt they had found some sort of meaning in both the attacks and the United States’s response to them.

But agency is key. After 9/11, an enemy could be identified (or created) and retribution sought. There was a clear narrative and action to be taken. Covid-19 feels different. Unless you’re a key worker, your best expression of heroism involves leaving the house as little as possible. While having a beer in front of a repeat of Minder is the kind of heroism most of us can get behind, it doesn’t feel quite enough to scratch this emotional itch.

The closest we’ve come to heroes in recent months have been the people at the heart of national institutions. Not government but certainly the NHS. Fortunately, television has us covered in this regard. We can expect a response from Casualty. But shows such as Hospital and 24 Hours in A&E have probably been slightly ahead of the curve in terms of what they’ve come to mean to viewers. They feel analogous to the weekly doorstep clapping that has punctuated the coronavirus crisis. They are essentially television celebrating, in a passionate yet oddly depoliticised way, the social contract.

They are comforting as much for what they say about us – our sublimated longing for community and our pride at the idea of collective endeavour – as for what they say about the public servants they celebrate. Are these selfless life-savers in inadequate PPE our Jack Bauers? It would be comforting to think so.

Inevitably, aspects of the small-screen reaction to the crisis will be lazy. As Hassler-Forest says, “You cringe at the certainty that every major series, once it returns, is going to do at least one episode entirely on Zoom. There will be screenwriters knocking those things out as we speak!” And yet something more considered might be possible. The virus has pulled the rug from under us in many ways. But it’s also reminded us of what’s important. Just as, in political terms, the NHS is probably safer than it has been in years, so too is the BBC in particular and the concept of public service broadcasting in general. “Maybe,” says Hassler-Forest, “we’ll be forced to think about what kind of world we want to build out of the wreckage?”