Television & New Media

This essay serves as the introduction to TVNM’s special issue on “Pandemic TV,” an analysis of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic affected principally anglophone television and television-watching in 2020 to 2021 (including television’s response to corresponding events such as the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and the fall 2020 U.S. presidential election). The introduction situates various periodizations of the pandemic, framing the dissonant temporalities of the pandemic against television’s traditional approaches to informing, representing, and containing ongoing crises. The essay also introduces the ten articles contained within the special issue, which covers representations of the pandemic, the logics of television present within the videoconferencing applications that came to define communication during the pandemic, and the changing labor of television studies scholars and teachers.

In pandemic TV, the horror of the home was not only part of the narrative in several shows that depicted pandemic-related plots, but also a result of the tension between the textual and the contextual. As people were feeling trapped indoors, even the most colorful televised living room stood as a symbol of the inability to leave the spatial confines of domesticity. In this paper, I show how pandemic television added an ominous layer to the representation of the home, either directly through narrative means or indirectly through text-versus-meaning dissonance. Intersectionalizing feminist analysis of the domestic space, I argue that texts that attempted to sidestep pandemic-related content often emphasized it even more so, through format and framing, therefore negating the escapism they were trying to achieve.

This article analyzes American cable channel HGTV’s programing strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically their construction of a “COVID-free” fantasia in their series Home Town and its spinoff, Home Town Takeover. By considering this response through the lens of dissonance, I argue that while the network originally emphasized their social responsibility to mitigating the spread of the virus, their business model incentivized them to move past the virus more swiftly than other channels, pushing the labor of mediating dissonance onto their on-screen talent and their audience. This case study foregrounds how variables like genre, channel, and audience shaped the television industry’s response to the pandemic, with HGTV’s business model built on “evergreen” reality programing leading them to abdicate principles of social responsibility both more quickly and more thoroughly, despite numerous options that would have addressed the dissonance of COVID in a more balanced fashion.

In January 2021 the BBC continuing medical drama Casualty (1986-present) returned to UK television screens for the start of its thirty-fifth series, with the premiere serving as the first episode of the show to have been produced and broadcast since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused production to stop suddenly in March 2020. It was, in many ways, a “Very Special Episode,” and not least because it was the first new episode of the series to be seen by audiences for four months. Set during spring and summer of 2020, the episode begins with a title card that reads “June 2020. Days into the lockdown: 90.” This article takes the position that this first episode of Casualty to screen on UK television following the March 2020 production shutdown (Ritman 2020) is productively understood as a “Very Special Episode” (VSE), with a view to arguing for its status as quietly radical television.

This article examines the representation of the COVID-19 global public health crisis on U.S. network television medical dramas. Programs featuring healthcare professionals like Chicago Med (NBC, 2015-present), The Good Doctor (ABC, 2017–2024), and New Amsterdam (NBC, 2018–2023) depicted the devastation of the pandemic and the plight of the frontline healthcare community to viewers at home through the fictional hospital. In particular, Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–present) produced a “very special season” dedicated to portraying COVID’s toil. I argue that the primetime doctor show attempted to lessen the pain of COVID’s impact by presenting its audience-as-patient with a way to manage their emotions around loss through narrative catharsis. The program adheres to a logic of alleviation in its care work for viewers. Such a tele-therapeutic strategy of engagement on the long-running Grey’s Anatomy, amidst mass suffering and death, also served to revive the series as compelling broadcast television in the streaming era.

Televisual dynamics have, in some ways, mirrored and modeled pandemic dynamics, with both involving moves between public and private, inside and outside. Yet the ensuing crossings, confusions, and reactions may yield quite distinct results, as demonstrated by two cases of U.S. television that engaged COVID-19: the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight (which makes claims to the “real” yet produced paranoid fantasies around the pandemic and the “others” with whom it was associated) and the Showtime comedy-drama Work in Progress (scripted yet based on the “true life” of co-creator/star Abby McEnany, which revealed how thinking about COVID cannot be separated from thinking about gender, sexuality, race, ability, and media fact and fantasy themselves). As both programs enact and respond to television’s and the pandemic’s challenging of boundaries (public/private, inside/outside, self/other, fact/fantasy) but do so in very different ways, they highlight limitations and possibilities of media logics in this pandemic age.

This essay examines “process” discourse and the politics of reassurance across the prototypically American media domains of reality TV and cable news. Using The Bachelorette’s 2020 season and CNN’s concurrent coverage of 2020s famously disputed presidential election as case studies, it argues that both broadcasts’ copious references to the soundness of the “processes” they purport to depict both naturalize and stabilize the tenuous notions of heterosexuality and democracy on which they rest. The two programs’ exemplary televisual “process” discourse reassures even cynical viewers that, though much of the pleasure US audience-members take in their broadcasts derives from the spectacle (or threat) of dysfunctionality, we can ultimately rely on the functionality of the systems that govern our lives. Not least, it courts the perception that television is the true arbiter of “the process,” and thus that TV itself deserves Americans’ trust—a vitally important impression to maintain during a global pandemic.

This article analyzes “The Politics Episode” of One Day at a Time, an animated very special episode produced and aired during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on two aspects that prompt broader considerations about the role of scripted television in responding to pressing social issues. First, I demonstrate how the episode’s narrative structure appeals to democratic deliberation as an idealized form of conflict resolution. Second, I consider how its production and airing timeline responded to—and failed to account for—the current events its narrative attempted to incorporate. Although the disjuncture between these two elements demonstrate the pitfalls for fictional television to address social issues in a time of constant crisis, I conclude by proposing that these “failures” can also serve to illustrate a specific “post-pandemic” structure-of-feeling, one where futures are perpetually deferred and where dealing with new social realities requires constant speculative iterations.

Zoom became a critical part of media consumption in the COVID-19 pandemic’s early lockdown months, appearing in everything from education to the nightly news to reality television. How did Zoom produce a new screen world that made everyday life look like TV? This essay examines how Zoom has figured on and as TV, focusing on it as a means to comment upon and also craft one’s own mise-en-scène. What might Zoom TV offer to our understanding of participatory media and of the racialized, gendered, and classed features of both television and everyday life?

The way we do television studies changes with ongoing innovation; digital media and successive phases of subscription pay TV have complicated our work for the better. Additional contextual complexity in TV delivery, and the related notion of TV as a medium in perpetual identity crisis, contribute to experiences especially vivid in terms of pandemic pressures. This essay shares our collaboration from the Summer of 2020 through January 2021. We synthesize email correspondence and our many Zoom meetings discussing pandemic-inflected topics including sitcom redistribution and sports, weaving these conversations into an “inner-personal archive” combining individual history and notes on experience with in-depth television criticism. The essay explores how we as television scholars refer to the archive, and how we relate to archives that are becoming subsumed into the digital. It uses a conversational format to deconstruct, decolonize, and demonstrate the process of narrating the archive, capturing our struggle to grasp recent changes in television viewing while overwhelmed with loss, betrayal, and pain.

This essay begins with a brief history of sensitivity training, a therapeutic and organizational protocol for the instrumentalization of empathy that gained traction in the second half of the twentieth century. The reflection on sensitivity training serves as a wind-up to a meditation on the version of insensitivity training that television manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, both gestures provide the basis to make a pedagogical call for an alternative, critical version of insensitivity training for contemporary students. The essay then explores how the meanings of in/sensitivity help to set up that pedagogical project and suggest its lineaments, as well as what that project should look and sound like, within the horizon in which the pandemic still very much establishes the terms and conditions for much pedagogical and scholarly work. More generally, the essay considers how the versions of such work altered by the rise and spread of COVID-19 may have made some subjects laboring in higher education become pandemic television—and what sanguine, ingenious responses to that becoming one may embrace. Finally, the essay moves to a concrete television case study that has instructional value for the would-be instigator of insensitivity training: Jann, a series saturated with elaborations and unfoldings of—which is to say, blueprints for—the uses of awkwardness, discomfort, and insensitivity.