The First Great Covid Movie May Also Be the Last

In early 2022, I wrote for a now-defunct publication about the absence from television and film of representations of the daily reality of the pandemic, especially in blue states where restrictions remained in force. Even as the same sorts of people who consumed prestige TV were insisting on the need for ongoing mandates and periodic returns to lockdown, they evidently preferred for their entertainment to take place in a nebulous pre- or post-Covid world in which the measures they advocated weren’t in force, such that they didn’t have to see the characters presenting their vaccine papers to gain entrance to restaurants or theatrically donning masks between the table and the bathroom once inside. I concluded: “This divergence between the real world and its televised simulacrum hints at a disavowed discomfort with the transformations of social life imposed in the past two years.”