On network television, using the mask is risky at best

When television slowly began to resume production at the end of this summer, great attention was paid to the safety of COVID-19. Some of them were hit and miss and ineffective, but overall it was widely accepted that it was vital to try, or at least to be seen trying. However, it was all about the COVID policy behind the scenes. On screen, in stories broadcast to millions of Americans, the presence of COVID and how it fits into fictional storytelling is hit and miss at best.

At worst, it’s a nightmare of ridiculous, milquetoast, equivocal gestures. There are fictional cops walking around with neck warmers they never put on their faces, desks full of doctors and lawyers gleefully chatting with unmasked strangers, and scene after scene of protagonists without facial cover standing in front of background extras walking around with medical clothes. – degrade the masks. In some cases, it’s clear that TV shows are doing their best to negotiate the bizarre demands of COVID storytelling in fictional worlds. If there is COVID fatigue in real life, surely there is COVID fatigue for entertainment, and it is difficult to cross the line between realism and the desire to escape reality. Overall, however, network television offers a portrait of the COVID response that is often distracting, often dangerous, and at times almost hilarious.

Law and Order: SVU is quite typical, as the network procedures in 2020 go. COVID appears quickly in the season one episode – the cold opening is a play about the Central Park bird watcher incident, and everyone in the scene is wearing a mask or has one around the neck. Masked officers show up to face the confrontation, but when Olivia Benson and others SVU regulars appear, they take off their masks before questioning the people involved. It’s an open-air scene, so it doesn’t seem so noticeable, except when the regulars next appear together in the team room, no masks appear. Two scenes later, two SVU detectives interview an ER doctor when they are masked, but the doctor they speak to takes off his mask and face shield.

There is an impressive amount of hygiene theater. The temperatures are taken and the hand sanitizer is discarded. But then Benson and Carisi enter an interrogation room and have a long conversation with a suspect without taking any precautions. Next, Kat and Rollins question a bartender inside his bar, with no mask to see. In general, the assumption seems to be that COVID is worth worrying about, but it is not transferable between characters with speaking roles or anywhere in the compound.

It is even more superficial in the Chicago-to, where both Chicago Med and Chicago fire have explicit stories of COVID and all-or-nothing PPE use, while Chicago PD seems to have completely ignored the pandemic, even though the background is full of extras wearing bandanas and surgical masks. (Maybe “completely ignored” isn’t fair. Several of the leads wear neck warmers, although it’s hard to imagine what they are for if they are never used other than as turtlenecks. stretchable). It is the same for FBI and FBI: most wanted – the latter has a scene where the protagonist’s father shows up for a surprise visit, and when he expresses his concern, the father holds a paper showing that he had a negative COVID test last week. “That’s not how it works,” the protagonist mutters. But the father is coming to stay for the weekend anyway.

This is what the happy medium of the COVID narrative looks like, and it’s both unsatisfying and distracting. Yes, these characters seem to be living in a pandemic. But in the interest of maintaining the status quo, it is a pandemic that lives on the periphery of their lives, a noticeable but not particularly noticeable annoyance as they go about their usual business. It’s hard to watch, hard not to get distracted by all the instances where the characters would absolutely wear masks without the fact that they were the boss of a TV show. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the inconsistencies. I spent a lot of Station 19 trying to figure out the logic why the characters could and couldn’t take off their masks, assuming there had to be a guideline that they all followed. Maybe there was, but it was a lot harder to say than on her sister show. Grey’s Anatomy, which takes a more holistic approach by giving its lead character COVID and dedicating the season to pandemic stories. Even on Grey’s, however, I wondered about a scene where two characters exorcise their stress by yelling at each other, sitting at opposite ends of a conference table. It was supposed to be a release, but I was only thinking of aerosolized virus particles.

It’s not easier on comedies. Sure Hypermarket, characters typically face COVID as workers in big box stores by wearing masks while in the store and then removing them in staff areas. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than blackish, which recently featured an episode where several characters came from out of state to attend an outdoor wedding. (No masks in sight). Sure Bob loves Abishola and The Unicorn, the series chose to ignore COVID entirely, a move that honestly feels like a relief.

The medical drama The good doctor also chose the “ignore” route. The series began the season with two pandemic episodes, but begins episode three with lead actor Freddie Highmore speaking directly to the camera. “The following episode portrays our hope for the future,” Highmore says, “a future where no one will have to wear a mask or take other steps to stay safe from COVID. Until then, please protect yourself and others. I understand the impulse. It would be so good if we could all move quickly to this moment in the future. But there’s a different kind of cognitive dissonance to watching a cheerful, light-hearted sitcom existing in a COVID-free fantasy world than for medical drama. For a medical drama, it sounds like a cop, and it’s even worse if you’ve seen the news that Richard Schiff, a lead actor on The good doctor, was recently hospitalized for COVID.

I still don’t know what I think about what is happening on network television this fall. My anxiety over the past year has totally reshaped my internal alarm system; my brain registers masks on the faces of strangers in the same way I have previously registered characters who were obviously driving in fake cars, totally oblivious to the road. I am instantly distracted, and whatever fictional suspense I was living in, I was totally devastated. It would be nice to turn off the alarm in my screaming mind at the sight of all these beautiful people on TV walking around their workplace with their bare mucous membranes exposed. I can not; that’s all I can see.

At the same time, I also know that there is a somber realism in these TV shows full of indifferent mask grip. We wouldn’t be in the crisis we are in now if America were full of diligent citizens wearing masks. While it may not be safe or respectful for all of these TV characters to spend their days in public without a mask, in many cases this reflects how these real people might behave. This knowledge does not make any of it better. If anything, it just makes those internal alarms even louder.

It also makes me feel like a desperate scolder, the kind of self-righteous censorship I’ve always hated. “These shows are bad because they show bad behavior!” I feel myself screaming, even though I have always hated this position and am dismayed to find myself recording mask violations like a teacher ready to hand out detention. Is it the moral responsibility of a popular network television procedure to demonstrate good public health procedures in the midst of a catastrophic pandemic? Is it like the absurdity of television in the 1950s which avoided showing married couples sharing a bed? Or is it more like the crackdown on portrayals of characters smoking on television? Even though it’s the latter, these are not children’s TV shows, and Law & Order SVU and FBI: most wanted should not be put in the position of being a good public example when the federal government cannot even fend for itself. And yet, I want to, anyway.

The answer to “what happens with masks on network television” is that in most programs it is a disaster. On most network shows, masks and other COVID acknowledgments look like sloppy, indiscriminately imposed half-measures, more of a shrugging escape than an attempt to take one of this year’s calamities seriously. . It is not primarily their fault. It is the result of the dramatic abdication of responsibility by the President and Congress and state legislators who resist masked mandates. But I’m tired of being unnecessarily angry with them, so my fury goes to the network TV proceedings. I’m a woman who looks at Olivia Benson, just wishing she wore her mask regularly.