Similar to Morpheus 02's recent thread but with a broader scope, the pandemic has big implications for the content of our entertainment as well as for its production.
Some programmes are released very quickly (most obviously the news and those which comment on it) but a lot of material for scripted series, non-topical panel and game shows (such as QI) or "reality" TV doesn't get broadcast* until months or even years after it has been recorded. Ordinarily viewers wouldn't notice this unless they watch very closely for the year mark at the end of the credits, but a year into this pandemic it can be quite jarring to see supposedly-new episodes coming out in which characters/panelists are mingling unmasked. It was especially prominent in December when we had to sit through so many Christmas specials (which unlike normal episodes are explicitly set at a certain time of year) that were obviously shot ten months** earlier.
This problem is especially bad for animated productions which generally take a lot longer to make than live action ones. To take Family Guy as an example, S19E05 debuted on 8 November 2020. It opens with Peter reading the Quahog Informant and exclaiming "God, can you believe that Trump hung himself in prison?". A caption then reads "We wrote this in February 2019. Were we right?", to which the answer so far is no. The previous episode featured a cutaway gag set in a pancake hospital, with a nurse interrupting to say "We need this wing for COVID.", which I presume was a late-stage edit.
This puts the creators of scripted media in a difficult position: If they start writing the pandemic into new episodes then they may find that it has already ended by the time those episodes come out and so they will look horribly dated. On the other hand if the disease sticks around*** and they don't write it in then the whole story could end up effectively taking place in an alternate timeline and based on a worldview that is obsolete.
A lot of comparisons are being made to the Spanish Flue epidemic of a century ago, but of course there was no television back then. I wonder if there were any radio dramas (or even book and magazine serials) from back then that were supposed to be set in 1920-1921 but still had the Great War going on?
*If "broadcast" is even the right word now that so many shows go direct to streaming.
**Possibly as much as twenty-two months in the case of 'Cats Does Countdown.
***Full lockdowns will probably be gone this year at least for the first world, but experts are warning that some degree of masking and social distancing will persist for years afterwards, to say nothing of the long-term economic and psychological damage.
Some programmes are released very quickly (most obviously the news and those which comment on it) but a lot of material for scripted series, non-topical panel and game shows (such as QI) or "reality" TV doesn't get broadcast* until months or even years after it has been recorded. Ordinarily viewers wouldn't notice this unless they watch very closely for the year mark at the end of the credits, but a year into this pandemic it can be quite jarring to see supposedly-new episodes coming out in which characters/panelists are mingling unmasked. It was especially prominent in December when we had to sit through so many Christmas specials (which unlike normal episodes are explicitly set at a certain time of year) that were obviously shot ten months** earlier.
This problem is especially bad for animated productions which generally take a lot longer to make than live action ones. To take Family Guy as an example, S19E05 debuted on 8 November 2020. It opens with Peter reading the Quahog Informant and exclaiming "God, can you believe that Trump hung himself in prison?". A caption then reads "We wrote this in February 2019. Were we right?", to which the answer so far is no. The previous episode featured a cutaway gag set in a pancake hospital, with a nurse interrupting to say "We need this wing for COVID.", which I presume was a late-stage edit.
This puts the creators of scripted media in a difficult position: If they start writing the pandemic into new episodes then they may find that it has already ended by the time those episodes come out and so they will look horribly dated. On the other hand if the disease sticks around*** and they don't write it in then the whole story could end up effectively taking place in an alternate timeline and based on a worldview that is obsolete.
A lot of comparisons are being made to the Spanish Flue epidemic of a century ago, but of course there was no television back then. I wonder if there were any radio dramas (or even book and magazine serials) from back then that were supposed to be set in 1920-1921 but still had the Great War going on?
*If "broadcast" is even the right word now that so many shows go direct to streaming.
**Possibly as much as twenty-two months in the case of 'Cats Does Countdown.
***Full lockdowns will probably be gone this year at least for the first world, but experts are warning that some degree of masking and social distancing will persist for years afterwards, to say nothing of the long-term economic and psychological damage.
