Coping with a pandemic: Television series and COVID-19
by Ariane Hudelet
From March 2020 to 2022, the global population endured months of lockdowns, social distancing, and sanitary measures, which restricted public gatherings and movement. One of the striking and intriguing effects was the specific sense of attachment, comfort, and knowledge that television series provided to their audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although all film and television production came to a halt from March 2020 until August, online streaming services flourished, and home consumption of audiovisual content surged, with television series becoming the primary choice. Especially during lockdown, these serial narratives were seen as a way of ‘coping’ with the crisis – whether by structuring time in an era when it became undifferentiated, connecting people through shared viewing experiences, or providing long-term narratives that either alleviated or made sense of the collective trauma we were all experiencing.
Beyond the obvious dangers of binge-watching and screen addiction, the connections fostered during this time have had a lasting impact, shaping how we engage with, discuss, and analyse television series today. Now that COVID is no longer an active crisis (though its memory remains vivid), this audiovisual essay section brings together video essays that explore this phenomenon from different angles, contributing to the memorialisation of this recent trauma. While textual academic studies (such as the Pandemic Media project) have already analysed how the crisis ‘generated a variety of new media configurations’, tracking and examining ‘how media emerge, operate, and change in response to global crises’, videographic essays allow for a unique combination of the personal, the poetic, and the analytical. This form is especially suited to conveying the intimate connection between the spectator and the serial narrative – a connection that proved so essential during a particularly trying time. By focusing on emotions as socially shared ‘structures of feeling’ during a period of global trauma, our contributors’ video essays offer a glimpse into a collective cultural experience whose effects are still deeply felt.
This collection is based on a set of shared parameters: each essay is 3-5 minutes long, features footage from a television series, and provides analysis or commentary through voiceover or on-screen text, explaining why this particular series resonated with the essayist’s experience of the pandemic – whether because they watched it during lockdown or because it illuminated some aspect of the pandemic for them. The value of working within common parameters or prompts has been explored extensively in recent years, and this project owes much to earlier collaborative efforts like Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary and Tecmerin’s ‘Screen Star Dictionary’. The adoption of a shared format also mirrors the serial form itself – we can think of these five essays as episodes in our conversation with television series during the pandemic, which may inspire further contributions.
Each of our contributors draws on a personal connection to a specific television series from that challenging period, while offering a retrospective, analytical reflection on how that series highlights features characteristic of the time – whether it be paranoia, anxiety, or an overwhelming desire for human connection and intimacy. The videographic form also allows for a creative exploration of the screen as an interface. During that time, for many of us who were not frontline workers in hospitals or stores, most of our social and professional interactions, as well as our cultural consumption, took place in front of a screen. The video essay is therefore an especially apt medium for recreating the density and multiplicity of these screen experiences, as evidenced by the common use of split-screen techniques by many of our essayists. The screen, an interface that both connects and separates, becomes a site where video essayists can quote or distort footage from television series and juxtapose it with other screen-based experiences – whether films (Toulza), newsreels (Fowler, Zecchi), or social media (De Bondt). This dialogic use of the screen space also highlights the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres, or between fiction and reality, that defined the pandemic era.
In The Haunting of Ill House, Pierre-Olivier Toulza focuses on the eerie resonance between Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018) and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011). Beyond the obvious sense of claustrophobia linking the series to the lockdown period, Toulza’s video essay emphasises recurring motifs of illness, evoking the ‘politics of disease’ central to the gothic genre. His poetic arrangement of split-screen shots captures the unease triggered by the COVID-19 context, imbuing recurring objects and gestures – like face masks, doorknobs, or hands touching – with ominous connotations. The proximity and distance between the split-screen shots vary, as if the images themselves could ‘contaminate’ one another.
A different kind of contamination – of minds – lies at the heart of Mathias De Bondt’s Decoding Utopia’s Conspiracy. The cult television series Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-2014) resonates with the acute paranoia of the pandemic, and De Bondt’s use of the desktop documentary format allows him to construct a conspiratorial reading of the series, combining clips from Utopia with glimpses of the r/conspiracy Reddit forum. These juxtapositions underscore the unsettling proximity between the series’ fictional events and the real-life developments of COVID-19. In his attempt to ‘construct order out of chaos’ by exploring conspiracy theories, De Bondt himself becomes entangled in the very yearning for structure and meaning that pervaded the pandemic.
After the unsettling discomfort and conspiratorial obsession, the next two videos focus on the yearning for connection that defined the period, and the ways television series managed to capture, alleviate, or even sublimate our overwhelming sense of isolation. For Catherine Fowler, the success of the BBC/Hulu series Normal People in 2020 was directly tied to this context of isolation, as its portrayal of physical intimacy became particularly poignant. In On Being With Normal People, Fowler repeats the first scene in which the main characters, Marianne and Connell, come together, to explore what it means ‘to be with’ or ‘to be without’. Her separation of sound from image mirrors the feelings of disconnection that many of us experienced during lockdown, while the repetitive structure of the essay evokes the monotony of days spent in isolation. Fowler’s use of newsreel footage from the pandemic period as a counterpoint to the solace offered by television fiction is also shared by Barbara Zecchi.
Finally, in Atemporalities and Becomings in the Age of COVID, Zecchi juxtaposes clips from the Spanish television series Estoy Vivo (RTVE, 2017-2021) with pandemic newsreels. The series provided an escape from the horrors of the pandemic, but also the newsreels reminded viewers of the traumatic reality unfolding outside. Zecchi’s use of repetition and reverse-motion techniques reflects the series’ themes of life, death, and rebirth while also evoking the sense of atemporality that defined the pandemic experience. Her essay raises questions about whether the transformative tropes of television series can help us move beyond the binary of life and death, as the newsreel footage activates viewers’ own memories of the crisis.
Whether these video essays emphasise distress, consolation, escapism, or cathartic grief, they all capture the sense of connection, dialogue, or resonance that television series provided during the pandemic. It has been said that the COVID pandemic lacked ‘iconic images’ (Lewis, Ostherr). Aside from the symbol of the spiked virus ball, most of the visual imagery from the crisis remains tied to recurring images – masked caretakers, empty streets, TikTok routines. As Lewis notes, ‘We need photographs of this pandemic because we need to remember it collectively… so we can stand back and reflect on the upheaval of our lives.’ In their own way, these video essays contribute to this act of memorialisation – not by offering iconic images, but by reenacting, to some extent, who we were through how we engaged with on-screen serial fiction during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Author
Ariane Hudelet is Professor of Visual Culture at Université Paris Cité (LARCA research unit/CNRS) where she teaches in the department of English. She recently edited Exploring Seriality on Screen with Anne Crémieux (Routledge, 2021) and La Sérialité à l’écran (PUFR, 2020); she is the author of The Wire, les règles du jeu (Presses Universitaires de France, 2016) and co-editor of the TV/Series journal. Her video essay Mad Men’s Babylon. Mapping Out a Musical Metaphor was listed among Sight and Sound’s best video essays in 2022 and published in [in]Transition in 2023. From 2022 to 2024 she was the PI of the Emergence-Idex project ‘TV Series in the Pandemic Era’ (Université Paris Cité), of which this publication is an output.
References
Avissar, A. ‘The TV Dictionary. An Introduction”, CST Online 2022: https://cstonline.net/the-tv-dictionary-an-introduction-by-ariel-avissar/
Boursier, V., Musetti A., Gioia, F., Flayelle, M., Billieux, J., and Schimmenti, A. ‘Is Watching TV Series an Adaptive Coping Strategy During the Covid-19 Pandemic? Insights From an Italian Community Sample’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 21, 21 April 2021: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33967845/.
Garcia, A (ed.). Emotions in contemporary TV series. New York: Palgrave, 2016.
Gorton, K (ed.). Media audiences: Television, meaning and emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Grizzaffi, C. ‘Poeticizing the Academy: Poetic Approaches to the Scholarly Video Essay’, The Cine Files, 15, Fall 2020: http://www.thecine-files.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CGrizzaffi_TheCineFiles_issue15-1.pdf
Johnson, C. and Dempsey, L. ‘How Coronavirus Might Have Changed Viewing Habits for Good, A New Research’, The Conversation, 11 November 2020: https://theconversation.com/how-coronavirus-might-have-changed-tv-viewing-habits-for-good-new-research-146040.
Keathley, C., Mittell, J., and Grant, C (eds). The videographic essay: Practice and pedagogy.
2019: http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/index
Kim, J., Merrill Jr, K., Collins, C., and Yang, H. ‘Social TV viewing during the COVID-19 lockdown: The mediating role of social presence’. Technol Soc, 2021: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8437809/
Lewis, H. ‘Where Are the Iconic Covid-19 Images? The Scarcity of Memorable Pandemic Photographs Reveals Something About this Crisis’, The Atlantic, 24 February 2021: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/where-are-iconic-images-covid-19-pandemic/618036/
Marya, R. ‘The Coronavirus Pandemic is Changing Broadcast and Streaming TV as We Know It’, Fortune, 30 March 2020:
https://fortune.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-pandemic-television-industry-impact-broadcast-streaming/.
O’Leary, A. ‘Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism’, NECSUS, Spring 2021:
Ostherr, K. ‘How Do We See Covid 19? Visual Iconographies of Racial Contagion’, American Literature, 92.4, December 2020.
Pandemic Media: https://pandemicmedia.meson.press/.
Pribram, E. Emotions, genre, justice in film and television. New York-London: Routledge, 2011.
‘Screen Stars Dictionary’, Tecmerin: https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/project/screen-stars-dictionary/?lang=en.
Sigre-Leirós, V., Billieux, J., Mohr, C., Maurage, P., King, D., Schimmenti, A., and Flayelle, M. ‘Binge-Watching in Times of COVID-19: A Longitudinal Examination of Changes in Affect and TV Series Consumption Patterns During Lockdown’, Psychology of Popular Media, 12(2), 2022: 173-185; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358840231_Binge-watching_in_times_of_COVID-19_A_longitudinal_examination_of_changes_in_affect_and_TV_series_consumption_patterns_during_lockdown
Williams, R. and Orrom, M. Preface to film. London: Film Drama, 1954.