TV Is Trying To Facetime Us

As productions everywhere have been shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been an array of efforts to continue shows even though everyone involved is stuck in their homes. Most news and talk-shows have continued in earnest, with their hosts broadcasting from their living rooms. Scripted shows have completely halted, either cutting their seasons short or, in the case of some of the shows below, attempting to finish their final episodes from home.

I’m a longtime fan of the live episode and the musical episode, both ill-advised but ambitious endeavors that hardly ever produce stunning results but are admirable in their attempts to make something inherently difficult and sweaty. There’s so little precedent for any show to do a live or musical episode and the end result often looks like it was made by a bunch of people who were unprepared to properly do their jobs. This is understandable since live TV and musical numbers isn’t what anyone working on the show was hired to do. I’ve found that episodes created with the limited resources available now due to the pandemic are similarly endearing. It’s the exact level of unprepared and out-of-one’s-comfort-zone that I want in a TV show at the moment, the kind of flailing that reflects my own lack of structure and security. I have watched several episodes of isolation-induced content and reviewed the various pitfalls and merits of those efforts below.

My blanket assessment about pandemic TV is that if this is going to go on for much longer, we need to get the audio quality under control. I understand that zoom audio is dismal even if you have a good mic, but these are expensive productions, can’t you have your talent record externally and sync the audio? It’s extremely distracting!

A Serviceable Substitute: Live with Kelly and Ryan (ABC)

Of the shows I watched remote episodes of, this is the one that most successfully retains the tone and purpose of the original show through all of the changes in format, look, and location. I watched the entire June 29th episode of Kelly and Ryan, and it was a perfectly nice thing to put on in the background while you’re getting ready in the morning, which I believe to be the intended use of a regular Kelly and Ryan episode.

Kelly Ripa is a professionally charming person who is excellent at having perfectly nice, completely benign conversations with people. Her ability to have a lovely chat with basically anyone translates well all the way from wherever she is in the Caribbean, even when translated through the awkwardness of a video chat. The show is much more watchable when the guest is also up to the task–their interview with fellow talk-show host Tamron Hall was great, but their interview with a culinary author about healthy summer cookouts was a little stilted. The only glaring difference is the lack of a studio audience, but once you forget it was there in the first place, it turns out you don’t really need it.

Treat Yo’ Self And Just Go Watch The Old Stuff: Parks and Recreation (NBC)

The one that I most wanted to love, but like a musical episode that turns out to only have covers, it was vaguely disappointing in an upbeat way. An interesting entry because there was no reason that Parks needed to do this. Unlike the others, Parks has been off the air since 2015, and they didn’t need to wrap anything up or fill a primetime timeslot that they would have usually occupied (though I’m sure NBC was more than happy to have this to air). As a result, this feels like just another cast reunion except everyone just happened to be in character.

The episode faces a huge hurdle in having to explain why so many married couples are participating from different rooms in the same house. The chain-of-calling is such a Knope invention, but I’m not sure it’s one that I really needed to see play out for 22 minutes. If this episode had any story at all, I think that would have helped a lot. Amy Poehler is, against all odds, as entertaining as ever while sitting alone in front of a computer, but not all of the cast members were totally able to meet her there.

Part of the problem here is that Parks and Recreation does really feel like a show from a different time. This doesn't bother me when rewatching old Parks, the same way watching shows from the 90s where people page each other doesn’t bother me. But pulling these characters into the present just felt a little strange, like having a zombie of a person you loved walking around your house. Don’t get me wrong, there were some very funny moments to enjoy and seeing the characters together again was nice. If anything it just confirmed that I don’t really need to see a reboot of this show.

“A” For Effort (And a “C” for Animation): The Blacklist (NBC)

The Blacklist was forced, like many shows were, to cut their season short due to the pandemic, but they already had a lot of the scenes in the can for their 19th episode (now the de facto finale) when they shut down. To finish the episode, they had the remaining 20 minutes worth of scenes animated. This is a good-faith effort, but the VO recording sounds dodgy, and the animation is as good as a GTA cut scene from 2013 (see below).

Everyone On Your Feet: All Rise (CBS)

All Rise, a CBS legal drama still in its freshman season, is to my knowledge the only scripted show currently on the air that has done an entire scripted episode while pandemic-induced isolation has been in effect. The chutzpah of this endeavour alone wins the episode a lot of points, and I was impressed by the sheer hopefulness of the effort put into making it. I applaud the cast, writers, and editors for attempting this, and the result is surprisingly successful.

What’s most impressive about this episode was that it did feel like an episode of All Rise. On a regular day, this is a show about navigating the bureaucracy of the legal system through the eyes of people serving various roles within it. It’s a little cheesy sometimes, and that carried over here, but the conflict of this episode was not far from the conflicts that these characters usually encounter–how do we navigate the limitations set by the system in a way that ensures that justice is still served? Unlike Parks, this episode benefits from having a more traditional story structure that allows the distractions to either fit into the story or feel like actual story problems and not external show problems. The hurdles they have to clear are presented by the pandemic and the shelter-in-place order, but the way the show works in its regular episodes work well to accommodate a story about a trial being impeded by a structural, logistical problem.

Rather cleanly, they ultimately determine that yes, they can serve justice. It’s a little hasty (Lola essentially bangs her gavel in virtual court, gives a brotherly lecture to the defendant and plaintiff, and the whole thing clears up within minutes), but it’s the kind of hopeful spunk that I used to love in Parks and Recreation. It’s a total fantasy, but it’s nice to watch government employees do their best, even when everything about the system feels broken (or in this case, unable to even run as its usual, broken self).

The characters also experience a lot of anxieties and problems that are happening to people everywhere right now, things that we haven’t seen on scripted TV yet. Lola worries about her mom going out and delivering food to people when she has an underlying condition that makes her vulnerable to the virus. Mark and Amy, who have just started dating, make the decision to quarantine together (and effectively move in together). Furthermore, they succeed in making several scenes between actors in disparate locations feel connected and touching. Mark and Lola, who have most of their heart-to-hearts in the stairwell of the courthouse, go to the stairs in their respective homes while they video chat to talk, and that was pretty cute. There’s a scene at the end of the episode where Lola reads a letter her mother sent her when she went to college about how they are always together, even though they’re physically apart, and I got choked up as she read it. The dance party at the end somehow hit me harder than the sing-a-long that closed the Parks remote episode, and I don’t like All Rise anywhere near as much as I like Parks.

Though I wish that more shows had tried this, I realize not all shows could feasibly fit an episode like this into their existing shows. The disparity in style and in production quality for a show like Billions or The Good Fight, both of which were unable to finish out their seasons, would be really jarring. The tone of a 44-minute series of video chats works for a show like this, but for most cable shows, and even a lot of network dramas, this would be very weird. I do, however, think most network sitcoms could pull this off, so shows like Mom, The Goldbergs, or Black-ish have no excuse now not to give this a go.