This article examines how narrative television in North America has portrayed COVID-19, often minimizing its impact and perpetuating a “return to normal” that sidelines meaningful societal changes.

In 2022, disability advocates Beatrice Alder-Bolton and Artie Vierkant introduced the phrase “the sociological production of the ‘end of the pandemic.’”[1] They argue that the widely-accepted “return to normal” following the COVID-19 public health crisis is not due to tangible changes in the virus, its prevalence, or its threat to our well-being, but rather the result of a “political calculation.” Prioritizing the interests of electoral politics, this calculation aims to normalize the effects of the virus rather than mitigate its harm, and shift the focus onto medically vulnerable individuals – placing the burden of care on an already marginalized community, and drawing attention away from the disabling effects of COVID on everyone else.

The broader societal implications of this normalization are significant: it excludes medically vulnerable individuals from participation in public life–restaurants, concerts, social events–and increases the number of people with chronic health issues due to post-viral complications.[2] Accepting the reality of COVID as an ongoing strain on our bodies and institutions is incompatible with a society driven by continuous consumption and labor. This prioritization of economic interests over collective health has historical precedents, such as during the AIDS crisis when neoliberal institutions resisted activist-led efforts to promote community care, instead favoring narratives of individual responsibility.[3] A similar trend can be observed in the response to COVID-19, where early collective efforts to combat the virus have given way to a reluctance to allow its ongoing presence to bring about meaningful changes to the “normal.”

This process of naturalization can be observed in rhetorical trends across numerous intersecting cultural institutions, including public health messaging, news media, and state leadership; this paper will concentrate on the role of narrative television in North America. Television is a medium motivated both by a desire to engage with topical, real-world subject matter as a marker of “quality”[4] and a need to maintain and repeat formats that have historically attracted viewers and generated success. This tension makes television ill-suited to capturing moments of crisis, and in the context of COVID-19 played a crucial role in not only minimizing the virus, but defining the pandemic not as a public health crisis, but a social event marked by temporary disruptions to the normal.

The Early Pandemic and Disruption of the "Normal"

Scripted popular media, including television, had a unique opportunity to model and normalize public health guidelines when they were widely accepted. By depicting characters wearing masks, practicing social distancing, or disclosing risk levels to one another, for example, television could have helped to normalize these behaviors, making them part of an accepted "new” normal. Behind the camera, the industry demonstrated rigorous adherence to these guidelines in behind-the-scenes paratexts. However, the actual depiction of COVID-19 in narrative television was often limited. When depicted in television texts, the pandemic rarely disrupted the established formats of these series, the social norms of pre-pandemic life, or the able-bodied status of major characters. This is not a conspiracy, but rather a practical consequence of how television functions. Nevertheless, this feature of television narration contributed to downplaying the virus and naturalizing the eventual, socially-produced, “return to normal.”

Disability scholar Lennard J. Davis provides crucial context for understanding this phenomenon. Davis observes that the concept of “normal” as we use it today is a relatively recent rhetorical framing. Before 1840, “normal” was used only in carpentry contexts to refer to perpendicular pieces of wood. It was later adopted by statisticians to describe features of the human body, a shift that Davis traces to industrialization and eugenics.[5] This linguistic evolution carries significant rhetorical and ideological implications, as the concept of "normal" presupposes that physical characteristics of workers can be considered uniform[6] while marginalizing those who do not fit into this constructed ideal.[7] Davis proposes that the “normal” – whether it be a body or a rhythm of everyday life – is a social construct that privileges certain populations.

The early years of the pandemic saw a significant disruption to the social rhythm of everyday life, a discourse dominated by rhetorics of the normal. Disability studies scholar Emily Krebs, in their analysis of "sick spacetime," observes that early-pandemic lockdowns forced much of the population to live within a temporality previously only inhabited by disabled people. This liminal space was characterized by inconsistent mobility, acknowledging the precarity of our bodyminds, and an ongoing state of “being in-wait.”[8] What was experienced as a “collective disorientation” for non-disabled individuals was experienced by many disabled and chronically ill people as familiar – even as a source for increased inclusion in public life. Krebs observes how the shared experience of sick spacetime also made visible the dangerous expectations of neoliberal capitalism,[9] which demands that bodies work “without restriction, accessibility tools, or substantive rest.”[10] The disorientation this produced for able-bodied people meant that the presence of pandemic restrictions had to be softened through the reassurance of their impermanence. This is why, Krebs speculates, a 2021 New York Times article defines the desired “normal” as the end of restrictions, rather than the end of the virus.[11] The presence of a highly contagious airborne illness challenges not only the routines of individual people, not only the day-to-day operations of capital, but the accepted wisdom that the appropriate response to becoming sick is continued, uninterrupted labour. In this way the virus not only disrupted, but posed a threat to, the normal.

Narrative Television's Responses to the Pandemic

Television series produced in North America during the initial waves of COVID-19 responded to the cultural anxieties generated by this crisis in three distinct ways: 1) by directly confronting the effects of the crisis on their characters, 2) by acknowledging the trauma of the virus, but setting the fiction in the near future after its nonspecific end, and 3) by existing in a fictional universe where no pandemic took place at all. While a more comprehensive version of this study would consider multiple examples of each approach, this paper focuses on the fifth season of The Good Fight (2017-2022) and the first season of And Just Like That… (2021- ), representing the first and second approaches, respectively.

The Good Fight was directly impacted by the pandemic, with the initial COVID-19 lockdown interrupting production on the fourth season, leaving most running plot threads unresolved. The following season, which aired over one year later, begins with an extended “Previously On…” segment that recaps events from the previous season before subtly transitioning into new scenes depicting each character’s relationship to the major political events of 2020. This episode is unique in that it exists almost outside of the traditional season structure of television—resolving hanging threads from season four, setting up events to be picked up in the coming episodes, and cutting to an altered title sequence right before the end credits.

Following “Previously On…”, a number of the political events from 2020 carry through to influence the rest of the series – most notably the murder of George Floyd and the January 6th insurrection – but the long term effects of the pandemic remain unexplored throughout the final two seasons. From this moment on the series’ treats COVID as a past event that had reached a binary and unambiguous end sometime between January and July of 2021. Following episode 2 of season 5, mentions of the virus are rare and only ever in the past tense, masks are absent entirely, and the long-term effects of the virus are never considered. The Good Fight explores the complexities of living through a pandemic, but confines that reality to the boundary of just one episode, finding sustained consideration to be, we can only assume, either too uncomfortable or too inconvenient to continue long-term.

This is most notable in Jay, who spends the majority of the “Previously On…” episode with long-haul COVID. In real life, long COVID is estimated to affect roughly 10% of COVID cases[12] and roughly 38% of individuals who have had three or more infections.[13] Long COVID can lead to long-term disability, manifesting as cognitive deficit or other neurological symptoms at least two years following infection,[14] cardiovascular issues such as increased risk of heart attacks for age groups of 25-44 years old,[15] sustained dysfunction to the immune system making the body susceptible to other infections,[16] or the development of long term chronic illnesses such as ME/CFS.[17] In The Good Fight, Jay’s long COVID is resolved offscreen before the next episode. This is not necessarily an inaccurate representation – while many cases of long COVID lead to long-term disability, others can resolve after as few as three months.[18] et it is incredibly convenient that in considering long COVID, The Good Fight does not explore the version that might affect the able-bodied status of its characters. This is especially significant in the context of The Good Fight, because Jay frequently participates in action scenes—making him not merely a character but a driving force in progressing the narrative in an average episode. To explore Jay’s transition into long-term disability would have necessitated changes to the formal structure of The Good Fight as a series. To meaningfully develop this idea over multiple episodes would disrupt The Good Fight’s “normal.”

Similarly, although the first season of And Just Like That… (2021- )–the continuation of the HBO series Sex and the City (1998-2004)–was shot and aired during the height of early pandemic restrictions, it is implied to take place at a moment just after COVID has been unambiguously defeated. As a storytelling decision, this makes sense–character dynamics can be affected by the collective memory of lockdown without depicting a likely site of recent trauma for many viewers—yet allowing the series to quickly return to the familiar rhythm of the franchise.

This is necessary because the format of Sex and the City is, fundamentally, dependent on restaurants. The original series would visit a different restaurant multiple times in a given episode as a vehicle for the central characters to commiserate over their individual challenges, to offer one another advice and solidarity. Even as the ongoing presence of COVID-19 becomes more prominent in the second season, the image of indoor dining remains central and is presented neutrally. These characters are not offered the chance to grapple with the restaurant as a site of moral complexity–never invited to sit in the discomfort of their own complicity in perpetuating the exclusion of certain populations from these spaces. The restaurant is an afterthought, and this is partly because it has to be. To disrupt the familiar imagery that prompts viewers to recognize the continuation of a beloved franchise would be too disruptive to this franchise’s “normal.”

The Limits and Expectations of Television

The contradiction at the heart of my critique is that it implies an expectation on these series that could be considered unfair. And Just Like That… is primarily invested not of problematizing the restaurant as a site of social exclusion, but in the political project of narratively centering female sexuality. The Good Fight cannot be held to a standard of accuracy on a medical condition that was not fully understood at the time of the episode’s writing. Television is organically driven to maintain and reproduce established formats, making it ill-suited to capturing radical changes to the status quo. The Good Fight could have revisited Jay’s long-COVID in season six when the condition had received more researched, but due to his role in the larger structure of the series this would have been too disruptive to the format of the legal drama. And Just Like That… could have shifted its scenes of commiseration to a park, but this would have interrupted the imagery that prompts us to recognize the continuation of a franchise. Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that, as these series participate in producing a collective imagination of a return to “normal” that is swift, uncomplicated, and resistant to systemic critique, they are made more aesthetically and thematically cohesive as a direct result. It is this very formal cohesion that makes this naturalization effective.

The refusal to allow COVID-19 to be meaningfully disruptive in narrative television reflects a broader societal unwillingness to confront the pandemic's challenges to established power structures. The pandemic as a social event was able to ‘end’ as the result of many subtle rhetorical shifts to position COVID-19 not as a virus, but as a temporary disruption to a “normal” way of life. There is no room to ask who is privileged by this normal, to imagine a more compassionate normal, or to problematize the real-world violence enacted in enforcing this normal. To do so would mean sitting with the pandemic as a site of exclusion, as a source for discomfort, or as a mass-disabling event. Until we allow COVID-19 to disrupt the hegemony of the status quo, the “end” of the pandemic will remain a collective fiction.

Footnotes

[1] Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton, “‘The Beyblade Strategy’ or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection,” The New Inquiry, April 28, 2022, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-beyblade-strategy-or-how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-focused-protection/. Return to text.

[2] Ibid. Return to text.

[3] Gary Kinsman, “AIDS Activism: Remembering Resistance versus Socially Organized Forgetting,” in Seeing Red: HIV/AIDS and Public Policy in Canada (2018), 311-333. Return to text.

[4] Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1996), 15. Return to text.

[5] Lennard J. Davis, “Introduction: Disability, Normality, and Power,” in The Disability Studies Reader, 5th ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2016), 7. Return to text.

[6] Ibid. Return to text.

[7] Davis, Disability Studies Reader, 6. Return to text.

[8] Emily Krebs, “A Sour taste of sick chronicity: pandemic time and the violence of 'returning to normal',” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (2022), 119. Return to text.

[9] Krebs, “A Sour Taste of Sick Chronicity,” 122. Return to text.

[10] Krebs, “A Sour Taste of Sick Chronicity,” 120. Return to text.

[11] Claire Cain Miller, Kevin Quealy, and Margot Sanger-Katz, “723 Epidemiologists on When and How the U.S. Can Fully Return to Normal,” New York Times, May 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/upshot/epidemiologists-covid-return-normal.html. Return to text.

[12] Claire E. Hastie et al, “True prevalence of long-COVID in a nationwide, population cohort study” in Nature Communications 14, no. 1 (November 30, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43661-w ; Altmann et al, 619. Return to text.

[13] Sianne Kuang et al, Insights on Canadian Society, Statistics Canada, December 8, 2023. Accessed June 24, 2024. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/75-006-X202300100015. Return to text.

[14] Maxime Taquet et al, “Neurological and psychiatric risk trajectories after SARS-COV-2 infection: An analysis of 2-year retrospective cohort studies including 1 284 437 patients,” The Lancet Psychiatry 9, no. 10 (October 2022): 815–827. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366(22)00260-7. Return to text.

[15] Yee Hui Yeo et al., “Excess risk for acute myocardial infarction mortality during the COVID‐19 pandemic” Journal of Medical Virology 95, no. 1 (October 7, 2022), 9, https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.28187. Return to text.

[16] Chansavath Phetsouphanh et al., “Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection” Nature Immunology 23 (January 13, 2022), 214, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01113-x. Return to text.

[17] Franziska Legler et al, “Long-term symptom severity and clinical biomarkers in post-covid-19/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Results from a prospective observational cohort” in eClinicalMedicine 63 (September 2023), 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2023.102146. Return to text.

[18] Daniel M. Altmann et al, “The immunology of Long Covid,” Nature Reviews Immunology 23, no. 10 (July 11, 2023): 618-634, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-023-00904-7. Return to text.

References

And Just Like That…, created by Michael Patrick King, season 1, HBO Entertainment, 2021.

“Previously On…” The Good Fight, created by Robert King, Michelle King, and Phil Alden Robinson, season 5, episode 1, Scott Free Productions, 2021.