Look, the Coronavirus is scary. It’s spreading around the world very quickly, it has a frighteningly high mortality rate among vulnerable populations, and it’s resulted in millions of people losing money and work as countries, states and cities ask their citizens to quarantine themselves in their homes. As I write this, the governor of Illinois just announced a stay-at-home order, which as a Chicagoan means my life just got a little more limited. Although in the spirit of honestly, I should tell you that I’m on a little trip to a neighboring state at the moment, meaning I may have to smuggle myself back into Chicago like Cleopatra appearing before Julius Caesar — look it up, it’s a fun story.
But we can’t be scared of it all the time, can we? I wanna talk about something that still matters but that’s a little less terrifying to contemplate than the potential loss of life and livelihood: what’s gonna happen to all the TV shows currently stopping production to protect their cast and crew from infection?
The list of shows so affecting is long and growing, and includes The Witcher, Stranger Things, The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings, Fargo, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and many more. (There are also lots of shows hit by this that aren’t hugely nerdy, but I’m trying to restrict my discussion to stuff that matters.)
Now, none of these shows have new episodes set to come out for a while, so we’re okay for the moment. The Walking Dead and Westworld will finish their seasons, The Plot Against America was filmed a long while back, etc. What I’m worried about is what happens towards the end of this year and into the next, when these high-profile shows would normally be coming out.
As you may have noticed, we’re currently in the middle of a post-Game of Thrones fantasy revolution, with all manner of shows involving dragons and wizards and swords and sandals coming to TV. As a fan of the genre from way back, I’m thrilled, eager to watch middle-tier also-rans like The Letter for the King as much as I am to see possible game-changers like Amazon’s Wheel of Time show. But this trend is like any other: it needs momentum to survive. And a stall like this could kill that momentum, meaning that studios may come out the other end of this tunnel having lost the fire that fueled their interest in the first place, and we may go back to watching 18,000 new shows about doctors or something.
Or worse, TV production could slow down in general. The Coronavirus is dragging the global economy into a recession. It’s affecting many businesses, and a lot of them are a lot more important to the lives of everyday people than TV, even if TV is very important to the life of this particular everyday person. Businesses take time to bounce back after a recession, and TV is no exception. The last 10-20 years have been some of the best in television history, with groundbreaking show after groundbreaking show keeping us on our toes. With the coming streaming wars, I thought the car still had a lot of gas in the tank, but there’s nothing like a global pandemic to sideline you at the side of the road, flagging down passersby for assistance.
But maybe we don’t need to get quite that apocalyptic. After all, a lot of these shows — Stranger Things, for instance — have said that they’re only stopping production for two weeks. If that’s the case, we shouldn’t expect too bad of a bump in the road later on.
But of course, it’s one thing to say that you’re shutting down production for two weeks, and another to get to the end of that period only to find that you’re still living in a world where the Coronavirus is spreading and effective testing isn’t widely available in the way it needs to be. That’s one of the scariest things about this crisis, isn’t it? That no one seems to know exactly how it’ll play out? That includes TV producers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those two-week stalls stretch out longer.
And while I’ve been talking about shows that won’t start to bleed in public for a while, there are series that will be more immediately affected. Shows like Supernatural and The Flash — basically anything on The CW, really — film new episodes for their current seasons while those season are airing, so if this crisis doesn’t let up, those shows will just…stop after a while, their seasons left incomplete until it becomes safe to shoot again. I imagine there are a lot of TV executives right now wondering what the hell to do about this, and I don’t have a solution for them.
In short, the Coronavirus crisis is worrying for TV fans just as it’s worrying for pretty much everyone else on the planet Earth, but I didn’t want to go full negative here, so let’s try and find a silver lining. Let’s imagine that the world does go into a global recession, with folk out of work as we inch back toward equilibrium. People are still going to need good stories, perhaps then more than ever.
You know, the first golden age of films came in the 1930s, when the United States of America was in the grip of the Great Depression and people found solace at the movie theater. This period produced movies that were both hugely popular and critically lauded, like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind (of course, parts of Wind have aged horribly, but that’s another discussion). Maybe we’re headed for yet another golden age of TV, one that gets us through the hard times to come.
Okay, in this scenario everyone is struggling to get through the day, so I don’t know if that lining was quite as silver as I wanted. Hopefully this all blows over sooner than expected, but if it doesn’t, there’s always a way to keep hope alive.
Stay safe and thanks for reading.