Love in the Time of Corona: the pandemic TV drama none of us wanted
At some point in the middle of an unending quarantine – which, depending where you were in the US, was anywhere from a three- to five-plus-month period – it became clear that there would be many novels, screenplays and isolation-induced artistic attempts to make sense of this time, and many of them would suck. How to make sense of a time that for many feels like a flat, indecipherable circle?
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Doing so in any familiar way may be futile, as numerous attempts to overcome the difficulty of quick-response art have demonstrated. The challenge confounded the uneven short-fiction compilation released by the New York Times Magazine called The Decameron Project and the mixed-genre anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, edited by Ilan Stavans; even the inimitable Zadie Smith wrangled with making sense of the nonsensical in Intimations, a six-part essay collection reacting to the pandemic, quarantine and the racial reckoning triggered by the police killing of George Floyd, to mixed reviews.
Now comes the first television series to attempt processing quarantine: Love in the Time of Corona, a four-part, half-hour series to air on Freeform. The show has decidedly less pretentious ambitions than The Decameron Project or pandemic literature – it’s a cable series that promises to capture “the hopeful search for love and connection during this time of quarantine”, from the “early days of the stay-at-home order through the events that ignited the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests”. The show is billed as a comedy, of sorts – four interconnected groups of people whose relationships are strained and changed under the weight of isolation – and the result is far more uncanny valley than funny.
Love in the Time of Corona was made hastily and experimentally, with evidence that the participants were game for what seems like an acting school challenge, a way to pass the time and turn TikTok dances and references into, supposedly, reflective art. But aside from issues of quality (and there are many, from a less than half-baked script to workshop-style acting to awkward but perhaps unavoidable reliance on FaceTime calls, which, depending on your TV taste, matters a lot or doesn’t at all), watching Love in the Time of Corona raises the question: what do we want out of quick-response TV? What’s the point – can there be one? – of applying the conventions of episodic narrative to a quarantine that we’re still half in, or of reflecting a time no one can possibly have processed?
It’s unclear what to make of the show’s efforts: it mostly plays as evidence that a quarantine experiment can result in a polished-seeming final product. Love in the Time of Corona does admirably attempt to make a show with the barest of lockdown parts – it’s shot at cast-member homes, starring real-life quarantining couples, families and friends. The storylines reach for a range of experiences: James and Sade (Hamilton’s Leslie Odom Jr and his wife, Nicolette Robinson) play parents whose discussions of having another baby are somewhat tangentially affected by the horror of the racist shooting of Ahmaud Arbery; quarantine roommates Elle (Rainey Qualley) and Oscar (Tommy Dorfman) attempt Zoom dating while their codependent best friendship abruptly swerves into potential romantic interest. Sarah (Rya Kihlstedt) and Paul (Gil Bellows), a recently separated couple, and their daughter Sophie (Ava Bellows), whose freshman year of college was cut short, find themselves unexpectedly under one roof and forced to acknowledge hard truths about what’s been swept under the rug. And Nanda (L Scott Caldwell) struggles to face harsh music as her husband, living in elderly care and separated by screens and glass, shows signs of dementia and their long-awaited 50th anniversary party faces almost certain Covid-based cancellation.
The show partly seems to want to process the strangeness of quarantine, to provide the opposite of escapism by ripping dialogue straight from the news or recasting a version of countless real-life conversation soundbites (“this thing is disproportionately affecting black and brown and poor communities; you need to check your white privilege”, “who knows how long this will last”,) into throwaway lines. There’s an admirable but unsuccessful effort to make the unsettling creep of the virtual into something entertaining and refreshing, but making FaceTimes or texts a central element of the narrative still does not translate to TV storytelling in any way that doesn’t feel clumsy and or doubly flattened.
Mostly, the show reads as an attempt to make some meaningful, coherent and hopeful character study with a “relatable” backdrop it haphazardly references. There’s something to be said for people’s earnest attempt to make something out of a time when all productions ground to a halt. But the finished product doesn’t seem so much like creative resilience, a TV screw-you to corona, as a rough draft rehash of the too recently familiar, a hazy, messy and devastating time that can’t yet be whipped up into anything coherent.
That the show was probably going to be not “good” is a given, as it was made quickly under the new normal of distancing guidelines into a half-baked product – which is ironic, since messy, inconclusive and humbled seems to be the only style that could possibly reflect the experience of 2020 to date. But beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the show, it seems worth noting how itchy, uncomfortable and deeply unsatisfying it was to watch a series strain for realist entertainment in a period whose strangeness, discomfort, and bizarre proximity course much deeper than a four-part, half-hour limited series riffing on domestic complications would allow. This will probably be just the first of many products, be it on the screen or on the page, to grapple with this cleaving of time and habits and what was assumed possible. But I remain skeptical that there’s anything that can capture a period we’re still very much in.
Love in the Time of Corona starts on Freeform on 22 August with a UK date to be announced
