Covid-19 comedies: Light, but not always funny

When the pandemic hit, the main problem for television productions was how you could possibly make shows in these times.

The next and related problem was how you could possibly make shows about these times.

This month, two series test whether you can make compelling television in and about a deadly global crisis while it is still going on, and whether anyone wants to see that right now.

Both Connecting..., on NBC, and Social Distance, arriving today on Netflix, are comedies.

Maybe it makes sense: Just as M*A*S*H (1972 to 1983) made dark comedy of the Korean War during the Vietnam War, the producers of these series must sense that asking people to escape a dire reality with more of that reality would be a tough sell without promising them at least theoretical laughs.

Some are more theoretical than others.

The well-meaning but bland Connecting... does not feel like an organic, fleshed-out story so much as a pandemic season of an existing, generic friends-hanging-out sitcom whose previous seasons you haven't seen.

The comedy centres on a group of friends in Los Angeles, now reduced to video chatting in between waiting for deliveries and doomscrolling the news.

Many of the major friend-comedy food groups are represented, with a pandemic spin on each situation and neurosis.

The high-strung Pradeep (Parvesh Cheena) is being driven stir-crazy by his young kids. Garret and Michelle (Keith Powell and Jill Knox) guiltily find that their marriage is thriving as the world falls apart. And possibly-more-than-friends Annie (Otmara Marrero) and Ben (Preacher Lawson) find their will-they-won't-they flirtation stymied by the they-can't reality of quarantine.

The sitcom unfolds chronologically from the start of shelter-in-place orders.

One of its pleasures is the attention to the details of those early days; we've spent enough time coping that pandemic nostalgia is actually a real, if unsettling, thing.

Remember thermometer shortages? Remember making your own hand sanitiser? Remember sourdough?

It is earnest, reasonably ambitious and lightly funny.

But Connecting... lacks connection, its characters and dynamics too standard issue to attach to. Too many of the quick-banter jokes feel as if they need a laugh track, and if you are talking about 2020 in 2020, the kind of laughs that feel most believable come with a catch in the throat.

That is the mode of the more-effective Social Distance, an eight-episode anthology comedy created by Hilary Weisman Graham of Orange Is The New Black (2013 to 2019).

As on Orange, the comedy of Social Distance is sharp, provocative and cathartic and, more often than not, it is rooted in pain.

Though the episodes are short, some less than 20 minutes, watching them feels like entering the lives of full characters who have stories and conflicts that predate the pandemic and would be interesting even without it.

The episodes are like tight one-act stage plays, ranging from sex farce to just this side of melodrama.

In the episode Delete All Future Events, Ike (Mike Colter), an alcoholic, has a few months of sobriety under his belt when the lockdown hits and his girlfriend leaves him. The isolation hits twice as hard for someone in recovery.

"Just focus on you," his Alcoholics Anonymous friend Gene (Steven Weber) urges him over FaceTime.

"If I focus on me any more, I'm going to get myself pregnant," Ike answers.

The narrative form says something about life in quarantine, but it also captures digital life in 2020 generally.

The season is organised chronologically and as it moves forward, the stories become less exclusively about the pandemic, just as life itself did with time.

The final episode, about black video technicians setting up to shoot a virtual graduation for a largely white prep school, focuses on the racial-justice protests after the killing of Mr George Floyd.

Whether or not any of these shows becomes a hit or a lasting classic, they are pieces of history.

If the global emergency doesn't drag on for years, they could be among people's only pop-culture records of how people lived in the pandemic, captured by the tools people used in the pandemic.

NYTIMES