It also meant predicting the future. David Shore, the showrunner for ABC’s “The Good Doctor,” knew that scripts written in the summer wouldn’t air until the fall. “That’s a challenge you really don’t face normally,” he said, speaking by telephone. “Usually, when you’re writing a story, you know what the world’s going to look like.”
Beginning in October, when scripted series began to return, and following through last month’s winter premieres, viewers could see the variety of approaches. Some shows have made the pandemic a star, and some have relegated it to a background role. Others have written it out of existence. Showrunners and executive producers have had to best-guess what audiences most want: Television that reflects the world as we experience it? Or that provides a distraction from it, particularly when that world seems to be on fire and sometimes literally is?
As someone who spent the early months of the pandemic toggling, hectically, between dire news reports and “Parks and Recreation” episodes, and who still tenses up during any scene in which characters enter an interior space unmasked, this remains something of an open question. But the people who actually make TV had to come up with answers.
Most sitcoms, especially newcomer series, wrote around the pandemic, often with an eye toward reruns. “I’ve always been a believer in making comedies that do not carry a heavy time stamp,” Chuck Lorre, the creator of popular CBS comedies past and present (“The Big Bang Theory,” “Mom”), wrote in an email. “A reason to avoid pandemics and bell bottoms.”
“Mr. Mayor,” which premiered last month on NBC, handled it in a punchline: “Dolly Parton bought everybody a vaccine,” Ted Danson’s novice politico says.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/arts/television/tv-coronavirus-pandemic.html
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