Get the Coronavirus Out of My TV Shows!

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. [View in Browser]( [Subscribe]( [Image] with Kevin Fallon Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - Can’t deal with these pandemic TV shows. - Aaron Sorkin’s new movie is great. - Gal Gadot revisits that “Imagine” video. - The only good TV news of the week. - That! Costume! Fall TV’s Caught COVID As these last weeks have brought the first crop of scripted TV shows that directly tackle the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to watch the coronavirus pandemic unfold on screen as much as I want a case of the...well, I feel like there’s a taste level here I’m about to cross. But you understand what I’m saying. There’s a certain hypocrisy there for a TV critic who has written untold words about the importance of watching the uncomfortable realities of life as we experience it reflected back to us on screen. Turns out that TV critic is an idiot. (That TV critic is me.) [Alternate text] Remember the terror that sprang out in March when it suddenly became clear how dangerous and inevitable the pandemic was going to be? Sort of like a Jack-in-the-Box...but Jack has COVID? Remember how the anxieties, inconveniences, risks, depressions, and furies never dissipated the way we thought, but just kind of kept spiking off a flatline that was already at the threshold of what we could cope with in the first place? Do you want to revisit all that again, over and over, on TV? To be reminded of how good we had it when what we were dealing with was just unfamiliar terror? Or maybe how endless it all is now that we’ve just settled into a baseline of horribleness for the indefinite future? Here’s the thing about [Social Distance](, the new Netflix anthology dramedy that premiered Thursday, and [Connecting](…, the NBC sitcom that debuted last week. As television series, they’re not bad. In fact, they’re objectively good. As far as these things go—and especially having already weathered the much less tolerable [Love in the Time of Corona]( and [Coastal Elites](—these two series are about as well-done as anyone could expect, or even ask for, when it comes to tackling these issues and producing original scripted content in the midst of a pandemic. And yet...I have absolutely no desire to see it on my screen. Nope! Connecting… goes the Zoom route we’ve become conditioned to accept as the new normal, and that’s fine. Think Friends, but quarantined. Last week’s premiere episode saw a gang of thirtysomethings having one of those big Zoom happy hours we all used to fill our calendars up with in the nascent days of the lockdown. They do a feelings check. They vent about the newly discovered horrors of being trapped in four walls with your loved ones, or the haunting loneliness of living by yourself. Just when their early-lockdown concerns verge on too twee, considering how harrowing things eventually became, their friend, who is a frontline doctor in New York City, hops on the call and breaks down while talking about having to decide which of two patients gets the life-saving ventilator. As was the case with Love in the Time of Corona and Coastal Elites, the sudden pivot to sobering trauma comes at you like a bug to the windshield. Depending on your mood, it’s either tonally outrageous, or completely appropriate: What have these last months been, if not a speed chase down the highway of hell, gnats of trauma flying at you at random moments, reminding how much worse it is than you thought? Social Distance is more elegant about it all, likely owed to its format of 20-ish-minute vignettes that focus the storytelling on isolated moments. In the premiere, Evil star Mike Colter grapples with his sobriety. In other episodes, a family (Oscar Nunez, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Guillermo Diaz) bumbles through the awkwardness of a Zoom funeral for their father. A nursing home caretaker (Danielle Brooks) and her patient’s daughter (Marsha Stephanie Blake) scramble to figure out care arrangements when the lockdown starts. A gay couple (Max Jenkins and Brian Jordan Alvarez) are driving each other apart while confined to such close quarters, and consider opening up their relationship as a reset. It’s appropriately dark, at times, and refreshingly funny at others, and the acting is uniformly excellent. One article about it said it “[captures all your quarantine feels](,” which, I don’t recall a scene in the series in which a character opens his window and screams until his voice box cannons out of his throat and then silently eats a whole pizza. But I absolutely cried. I absolutely laughed. And I absolutely never want to see anything like it again. Maybe some of it is Zoom fatigue. Maybe some of it is “too close to home.” Maybe some of it is that this whole experience has been so surreal and unprecedented that easy explanations and critiques just don’t come to mind. But you know what is coming? More COVID TV. It’s coming on This Is Us. It’s coming on Grey’s Anatomy. It was inescapable in The Bachelorette premiere. Not even The Great British Baking Show’s bucolic countryside tent was safe. I don’t have an answer for how these shows should deal with the biggest collective experience of our lifetime, or what exactly we want to see—if anything at all. I don’t have any wise concluding thoughts to that. Just pretend my Zoom screen froze and we had to end the call. Absolutely Watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 If you enjoy wailing into a pillow for two hours, absolutely watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 this weekend on Netflix. That’s not a pan of the movie. In fact, it’s probably the best endorsement a film like this could warrant. A timely movie at a moment when the amount of decades-old tales of broken judicial systems, government censorship, abuse of American citizens, and institutionally sanctioned racism that are ruled “timely” are at a boiling point, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is perfectly salted to scald you as it boils over. [Image] It’s the second film that Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed, following Molly’s Game, which was delicious when it was superb and utterly rotten when it was laughable. This week is a veritable staging of “This Is Your Career, Aaron Sorkin,” [a lightning rod]( whose affinity for speechifying grandeur, blunt moralizing, and lacerating insight form an equation that can explode its target when the math works out, but risks missing by miles if just one calculation is off. The West Wing [cast reunited]( for a staging of a standout episode, “Hartsfield’s Landing,” to benefit the organization When We All Vote. The nostalgic sojourn exemplified everything about the show’s political outlook that worked so well then, and which seems so wrong for the current moment. It’s fascinating, then, to witness how perfectly he calibrates the telling of this 1968 trial to resonate deeply. There were actually eight counter-culture protestors from various activist groups who were arrested as public examples at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, after protests escalated into violent clashes with police. Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, played by Watchmen Emmy-winner Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, saw his case eventually severed from the pack after a litany of egregious miscarriages of justice, each harder to watch than the one before. Among the titular seven were the shrewd and mischievous Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), righteous flower-child Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), and smug-in-tweed idealist Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne). As their lawyer (Mark Rylance) runs up against the blatant racism and bias of their judge (Frank Langella) and exposes the ways in which a fair trial was being sidelined so that the men’s fates could be used as political props, you yearn to escape to our modern reality where everything is so much better. Oh, wait… Who knows what awards season will look like this year, but The Trial of Chicago 7 will likely be a central part of it. You could make the case for any named actor in this story to be campaigned for acting nominations, though, for us, it’s Abdul-Mateen II who does the most remarkable work. And you can now watch it all on Netflix! Just have a pillow ready. Gal Gadot Explains Herself, Sort Of We don’t have a vaccine. We don’t have a bailout plan. We don’t have a testing and tracing infrastructure, any economic safety net, or healthcare contingency. But we do finally have at least one thing we’ve all demanded since the start of this pandemic. Gal Gadot has explained herself. Well, that’s actually a loose characterization of the comments she gave defending what in the world she was thinking when, in response to a deadly disease affecting millions and rendering even more jobless and without recourse, she thought the best way to help was to [rally a bunch of famous people to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine”]( and then release it out into the world. [Alternate text] “Sometimes, you try and do a good deed and it’s just not the right good deed,” [she said in a Vanity Fair article this week](. “I had nothing but good intentions and it came from the best place. I just wanted to send light and love to the world, and it didn’t transcend.” I have some questions. What was the good deed, exactly? What was the deed at all? Who was being helped, in any direct manner, from that video? And, yes, good intentions go without saying. No one thought there was anything particularly malicious about the video. But it couldn’t have been a more egregious misfire. Are we now allowed to shrug away failures by saying “it didn’t transcend?” “Sorry, this article sucked. It didn’t transcend.” “I meant to unload the dishwasher, but it didn’t transcend.” “I started to apologize for my dumbass little video, but it didn’t transcend.” Reba!!! It was announced this week that Norman Lear (legend, icon, saint) is producing a TV series version of Fried Green Tomatoes (legendary, iconic, saintly) set to star Reba McEntire (you get the idea). [Alternate text] The thing about this idea is that it is perfect. The constant mining of existing intellectual property for new television is exhausting, sure. But if you’re going to do it, you should have Norman Lear remake Fried Green Tomatoes with Reba McEntire. The thing about Reba is she’s a phenomenal actress: Annie Get Your Gun, the sorely underrated Reba, the “Does He Love You” music video, those Colonel Sanders KFC commercials... TV news has been [unilaterally]( [horrible]( [this week](. Finally, something nice. Catwoman!!! [Alternate text] God’s been down here designing costumes for [the new Batman movie]( and we ain’t had no idea. [Alternate text] - The Trial of the Chicago 7: Nothing better than a great courtroom drama. (Friday on Netflix) - David Byrne’s American Utopia: [Says Variety](, “There’s nothing ironic about the title of American Utopia.” OK! (Saturday on HBO) - What the Constitution Means to Me: One of the best things I’ve seen on Broadway, and now on TV, too. (Friday on Amazon) - Supermarket Sweep: Watch Leslie Jones yell about groceries, it’s what we deserve! (Sunday on ABC) [Alternate text] - Clouds: The youth cancer musical is just not the mood I’m into right now. (Friday on Disney+) - Rebecca: Maybe stop remaking Hitchcock movies? (Wednesday on Netflix) Advertisement [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( © Copyright 2020 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 [Privacy Policy]( If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, [click here]( to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can [safely unsubscribe](.