Out-of-Mind to Top-of-Mind: Quick Response TV Ditches Escapism for a Realist Approach that Falls Short amid Pandemic

For the better half of life in COVID, we sat in utter agony, begrudgingly scouring our Netflix accounts for anything that might offer refuge or distraction from the crumbling world outside. What we got, though, was just the opposite.

In times of crisis, the media we consume is reflective of our collective desire for sense-making, catharsis, and universal truth. Increasingly, our desire is met by an intense realism. We say we want to keep it real, but can we handle it?

Assemblages of corona-virus response television have emerged to confront us with the harsh realities of life under lockdown. But what good does it do us? And do we run the risk of further mystifying the very crisis we are trying to make sense of?

In an effort to find meaning, this new genre of television abandons all comfort. And the artistic desire to unempathetically decipher – to interpret for us – crisis has only hastened its response time. This newfound tendency to engage in what’s called quick response art reveals the dangers and futility in responding to tragedy too soon as well as its usefulness as a collective coping mechanism.

Nascent attempts at pandemic-response television fail to respond meaningfully precisely because they grapple with the time that we are still in. The response evades any sort of immediate processing so that it can never be complete, thus depriving its audience of the catharsis they so sought.

And public response seems to reaffirm this unsatisfaction, despite the well-intended efforts. Love in the Time of Corona, the first of many television series that attempted to process quarantine, was described in the Guardian as “the pandemic TV drama none of us wanted.” The antithesis of escapism, the 4-part series borrowed dialogue straight from news that felt too fresh to viewers. Shortly after, Netflix released their take, Social Distance, an anthology series of short vignettes. The series was filmed with Zoom technology and Nest cameras that made for what was on the one hand a more realistic depiction of life in a time of crisis, and on the other, a painful reliving of what was months of isolation and hardship for everyone. HBO’s Coastal Elites and Netflix’s Homemade, a collection of 17 short films from acclaimed filmmakers, followed along with other long-running series that pivoted to a COVID setting. Homemade came closest to catharsis in achieving art that imitated life, but even with the force of renown filmmakers behind it, it too fell short.

To borrow a line from Homemade’s final film, “art is just a way to force a new perspective on something familiar.” But for many of us, our current situation is anything but. Whether or not directors feel they have a responsibility to confront things at the forefront of the national psyche, the abandonment of escapist fantasy for hyper realism left the general public calling for collective ignorance, or an end to a representation which felt to pretty and neat.

For what does it do to us psychologically to being antagonized with extreme realism? How jarring it is to be confronted with the themes of mania, identity crisis, loneliness, and mortality. And where art’s job is to beautify – to make painful things digestible even – beauty is seldom a comfort. While our experiences reiterated in media may be reassuring in their recognition, our impulse to wrap up neatly the incomprehensible is deeply discomforting.

As viewers, we are faced with a conundrum. Our desire to be comforted with a sense of on-screen solidarity is always weighed against the impending dissatisfaction when the truths we crave continue to evade our grasp. Both response time and a departure from escapism fuel this dissatisfaction.

To better understand the failures of quick-response television, we might turn to the way we consumed media in past times of tragedy. Shock was the defining technique of early cinema. It was meant to jolt the reader from their reality, distance them as to create a cathartic space of viewership where they could process things at a distance. Take WWII for example, a traumatic event of different proportions. Technology impeded any sort of on-screen response until the post-war period. In fact, war films didn’t proliferate as a genre until the 1950s. Even though time had passed, these filmmakers opted for escapist fiction in their response to what was still a raw and unsettled collective memory. Scenes of war were shown, but only as a contextual backdrop to the dominant narrative which seemed to always achieve an emotionally neat or even beautiful ending.  

This emotional neatness and cathartic distance from the messiness of reality is precisely where quick-response television falters. Not enough time has passed for art to offer any meaningful understanding of a crisis we are still very much in. And any attempt at neat endings or comprehensibility fall short. They ring false.

Perhaps such content has a fixed response time, so that artists can respond in deeper, more nuanced ways. Just because technological advances allow us to respond faster than ever, should we? This first wave of response television might pave the way for those yet to come, as the series that did admit to the chaos and messiness of life mid-crisis offer insights into what content performs best. But no true, transformative series can emerge until we can see an expiration date for our current predicament.