The Entertainment That Sustained Us During the Pandemic

The pandemic has been a shared global experience, a collective trauma even, that sadly hit the most vulnerable the hardest but affected everyone to some degree. One way that many of us coped was to watch ample amounts of entertainment streamed into our quarantined households. (Early on, there were rumors that Netflix couldn’t handle the increased viewership and might crash, and we let out a collective gasp, but thankfully that did not happen.)

While there has always been a body of literature and movies about pandemics and plagues throughout history, it was also interesting to see the new resonances already familiar or recent stories developed in light of the most recent pandemic. Certain themes emerged as more relevant than ever; stories of extreme isolation, survival, and repetitive existences all hit too close to home. In contrast, to some extent, we also desperately craved more lighthearted or humane shows, ones that gave a comforting sense of normalcy and a heartwarming reminder of the world we had to put on pause.

Here are some of the general themes of shows and films that I found particularly resonant during my quarantine year:

1. Group Hug Shows

During the early pandemic months, high anxiety led some of us to seek entertainment that was as low stress as possible yet distracting enough to avoid boredom. Arguably the best of the bunch was Schitt’s Creek, a Canadian comedy that lurked under the American radar for five seasons (despite having some well-known stars like Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara). A sudden Emmy sweep helped bring the show to the forefront, and Netflix access propelled it into a major hit. The show is about a once-wealthy family that loses all their funds in a financial scandal and has to restart their lives from scratch in a small town and live in a motel. While on the surface it’s a wacky comedy parodying rich eccentrics like in Arrested Development, the show reaches deeper meanings as it progresses, highlighting the pursuit of authentic relationships and connections and focusing on what truly matters in life. The show helped ground those of us who felt caught up in an overheated Instagrammable society and made us remember our loved ones and our family can be our rocks during adversity.

An honorable mention in this vein is another Canadian Netflix sitcom, Kim’s Convenience, about a humble Korean immigrant family running the title convenience store and adjusting to internal familial and external cultural conflicts in a humorous, self-deprecating way. The smaller human conflicts in humdrum everyday events felt reassuring in a world now caught up in terrifying survivalism.

2. Crazier-Than-Reality Shows

Another form of arguably less healthy escapism was to watch the next level in so-called “reality TV”: hyper-exaggerated reality TV. Tiger King was the early breakout example of this genre, out-horrifying the horror around us with outlandish behavior, like Game of Thrones meets Siegfried and Roy meets Duck Dynasty. We vicariously felt our lives couldn’t be that bad or absurd, pandemic or not, if we were at least avoiding feeding ex-spouses to tigers and getting embroiled in drug-addicted love triangles.

3. Extreme Isolation Horror

Certain horror classics and series took on greater dimensions of terror as they reminded us of the pandemic’s scariest aspects: extreme isolation and the need to survive while trying not to turn on each other in the process. The Stanley Kubrick-Stephen King classic The Shining felt oddly reminiscent of being trapped in your pandemic home, with not a living soul able to come to the rescue, let alone visit. Hoarding food in storage (just as we were unable to get supplies early on in the pandemic and were scared to venture into stores with potentially infectious people), trying to stay entertained with little to do aside from garden mazes or tossing a ball against the same wall, rotating repetitive chores and routines, and slowly turning on each other within a stressed household seemed a little too familiar now, ghostly possession notwithstanding.

Another more recent horror show, The Terror on AMC (Season 1) focuses on the hypothetical story of a real-life historic incident where two large British vessels sought out the elusive but potentially lucrative Northwest Passage through the Arctic and were never seen again. The show conjectures how the doomed mission desperately tried to survive against the most extreme but constant dangers: weather, starvation, lead poisoning, madness, and finally a brutal monster. If anything, it helped viewers like me feel that maybe we didn’t have it so bad in our pandemic shelters, relatively speaking, and that perhaps COVID-19 was slightly less beastly than the mighty Tuunbaq, although the virus could wreak similar damage to human bodies if given the chance.

4. Groundhog Day(s)

Filmed before the pandemic, but oddly perfectly attuned to it when released via Hulu, the film Palm Springs was a quirky mishmash of sci-fi, rom-com, and frat humor. The general premise is the existential fallout of Andy Samberg’s main character entering a mysterious time-loop in Palm Springs and being unable to escape. The premise was famously covered in the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day and in numerous sci-fi time-travel and trapped-village films (such as the Tom Cruise film The End of Tomorrow, the old '60s show The Prisoner, or the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show), but this movie’s sense of everyday modern life meshed perfectly with the absurd feeling that our once banally comfortable lives had become somehow unexpectedly but irrevocably inoperative. We were trapped in broken-record existences, repeating the same daily routines, unable to leave our neighborhoods due to COVID. Could we laugh at the absurdity as readily as Andy Samberg? We at least tried.

5. Soothing Hobbies

Some popular coping mechanisms during the pandemic involved turning to self-contained homebound hobbies like cooking, baking, gardening, crafting, etc. Accordingly, shows that focused on these hobbies were all similarly comforting, such as The Great British Baking Show on Netflix and its spinoff The Great Pottery Throwdown on HBOMax. In contrast, it was also nice to see travel shows, so we could vicariously live through past trips while in lockdown, like Rick Steves’ Europe or old Anthony Bourdain episodes.

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6. Nostalgia Trips

In a related vein to the group hug shows, entertainment that reminded us of more solipsistic past normalcy felt bittersweet and wholly necessary. Cobra Kai was particularly perfect for Gen X’ers still in denial about being deep into middle age, or that expressions like “awesome, dude” or loud guitar bands ever went out of style. By meshing our fond memories for The Karate Kid’s corny teen excesses with a surprisingly mature and complex take on 40- and 50-something relationships, the show anchored us in the world we missed so dearly, while pointing out the best way to mentally survive the pandemic: by focusing on what matters to us and what we still have. Sometimes we just need a silly, feel-good anthem in our heads, like “You’re the best around! Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down!”

Hopefully, as we shift at our understandably hesitant pace back into our normal activities again thanks to the amazing and fortunate vaccine, we will retain a greater appreciation for the things we took for granted in the pre-pandemic world. And escapist entertainment aside, we can also pause now to think about how we can heal the societal gaps that left too many of us behind, lost to the real-life terrors of a callous, merciless virus.