Rolling Covid in Pop Culture Thread

Heard a song about wanting to get back to normal after Covid by UK folk singer Beans On Toast, it was called "Human Contact" and was not good.

the Organised Crime episode, they are now having a vaccination party for the rich with the stolen vaccines

Today I learned that Robert Crumb is still alive. For some reason I had it in my head that he committed suicide after appearing in Crumb, but that was his brother.

Of all the people I turn to for life advice, Robert Crumb isn't on that list because until just now I thought he was dead. But if he had been on that list, he wouldn't have.

An episode of "The Bear" makes a reference in passing to how the restaurant survived covid.

in the final season of Superstore they had a covid episode featuring panic-shopping

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/08/the-unabashed-spectacle-of-p-valley

After a two-year hiatus, “P-Valley” ’s second season premièred this June. We had to wait one episode to return to the Pynk. The coronavirus, or “the rona,” has invaded Chucalissa. Uncle Clifford and Autumn Night, the Pynk’s new co-owner—at the end of Season 1, she miraculously saved the club in an auction—have set up a mobile operation. A client, bored with his family in quarantine, may steer his vehicle through a car wash, where masked women will give him a neon-lit show. The covid story lines this season far exceed much of what I’ve seen since television writers began broaching our pandemic reality. “P-Valley” meditates on the culture of pandemic life—the paranoia, the illness, and the economic precarity it wrought and continues to wreak—by incorporating it into the preëxisting action.

A lot of the rona riffing is darkly funny. One dancer sneezes on a client, who turns out to be a health inspector. Uncle Clifford dashes around the town, struggling to secure P.P.E. before the inspector returns. But other facets are spectral; we get the sense that the writers want to endow our national illness with a lore. Loretta Devine plays Granmuva Ernestine, Uncle Clifford’s maternal figure, a blind woman who owned the Pynk decades ago, when it was a juke joint. Ernestine gets covid. In her delirium, she journeys to a river, where she begs to be cleansed. She calls out to her daughter, Clifford’s dead mother, and soon Clifford is seeing visions in her Cadillac’s rearview mirror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEbBUGPAvCE

What's a Freevee?

L&O SVU had everyone masked up and awkwardly taking masks off to talk for about 3 episodes then just gave up.

there were screens in the courtroom, but yes, quickly dropped.

whereas Superstore stayed with it until the end of the show (albeit only a dozen or so episodes later)

i never know the kind of lag there is between recording and airing but i think we'll be seeing presenters standing strangely far away from each other for a while yet. Forged In Fire, i notice, has extra-long judge's tables at the moment.

What's a Freevee?

it’s IMDB TV’s new name

you know, like the CPE

wait, CPA

Jeff’s branding is impeccable

"The Rehearsal" was largely mask-free, but masks did pop up now and then among the crew (when revealed) and sometimes background actors or brief appearances from other characters. I don't know what union rules/filming regulations are right now, but I still see lots of behind the scenes promo shots of films/shows where the cast/crew is masked. Like these:

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,g_center,pg_1,q_60,w_1315/e7d6c45634d22d8a8fda550b37f7f6a4.jpg

Our shoot on Instagram/Our shoot on twitter pic.twitter.com/mjaArmR5Vw

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) August 22, 2022

I don't know what union rules/filming regulations are right now, but I still see lots of behind the scenes promo shots of films/shows where the cast/crew is masked.

I'm adjacent to a lot of this and it's a miracle itself that AMPTP, DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, Teamsters, and Basic Crafts unions could agree on any kind of basic covid protocols w.r.t. vaccination and masks. The current agreements expire on October 31 and I doubt they'll be renewed again. For the most part it's working but constantly under the threat of hair-trigger clusterfucks. Movie stars who refuse to be vaccinated but have pull to keep from being re-cast. Various "normalization of deviance" behaviors to cut costs.

My favorite story was a production/super-spreader event that infected several dozen people with omicron just before everyone went home to their families for Thanksgiving (and in turn infecting dozens more). The person who infected everyone on set? The covid safety officer.

Thats brilliantly fucked up.

Movie stars who refuse to be vaccinated but have pull to keep from being re-cast

Would loovvvveee to know who those cunce are.

Some names named in this article from October 2021
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/covid-vaccine-mandate-hollywood-1235026178/

Finally saw "Worst Person in the World," and, yeah, ends with people in masks (with no commentary).

Have been playing the "Spider-man" video game, and even though it came out in 2018 there are stretches of everyone wearing surgical masks around NYC because of an airborne respiratory contagion, which is just a weird coincidence.

Reading the surprise fifth book in Dave Hutchison's Fractured Europe Sequence, one of the near-future events of the earlier books was a global flu pandemic. It's back in flashbacks and there is so much mask and lockdown talk, many asides about stupid Americans refusing to social distance and dying by the bushel.

(also would recommend the series if you're into Gibson and Le Carre)

I only learned this existed a week ago, ordered it immediately.

Died Suddenly is the newest antivax crap trending right now

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/11/22/new-died-suddenly-film-pushes-unfounded-depopulation-claims-about-covid-19-vaccine

"Glass Onion" !

Must be close to two years since I've posted in a Covid-related thread...The third season of The Morning Show is the most pointed attempt I've seen to document the first few months of the pandemic. It's a flashback episode meant to fill in the gap between the end of S2--where Jennifer Aniston's character comes down with the virus and does her show remotely--and S3, which takes place present day.

It's not great, but it did more or less capture the strangeness of that time.

I'm trying to think if I've seen any other recreation of those early days in pop culture.

I see a lot of books--non-fiction, not popular culture--but it'll be a while before I'm ready to read a book on that year, if ever.

From upthread:

Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn is set in the present day, and it’s a MASSIVE RELIEF to finally see a film or TV thing in which mask-wearing is completely normal, right down to a non-masker losing their rag at a supermarket checkout person, and people at a parent-teacher conference fiddling with their masks while speaking, or getting tsked for dicknosing.

― dark end of the st. maud (sic), Friday, January 21, 2022 4:07 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Really catches the awkwardness of social distancing too.

^^"Present Day": Spring/Summer 2020

Drive My Car and Worst Person In The World both end with scenes set in the mask-wearing present without the scripts needing to comment on it.
― symsymsym, Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Saw both of those, and the not-commenting was interesting; COVID was just a part of life. in The Morning Show, it's an unfolding story (interrupted by other stories: Jan. 6, Roe, etc.).