The Conners will pass the covid-19.
It was about time.
Since 1988, this Illinois family has struggled between countless money problems, declining job prospects, rising opioid use, and an irreducible risk of losing their old, cluttered home.
All the problems that squeeze the American lower class, theirs, are up to them.
Why should the pandemic that has killed 220,000 of their compatriots be lenient with them?
When the new season of
The Conners
, the follow-up to
Roseanne
, premieres in the US this week
which was released, already without the leading actress, in 2018, the coronavirus will be like one more character.
“We always try to represent the problems of working families.
Pretending that this is not happening seems like being disconnected, ”
one of its protagonists, Sarah Gilbert
, told
The New York Times
.
It will not be the only long-running series that suddenly has to include the pandemic in its universe to continue speaking to viewers of 2020. Starting next week,
Superstore
will tell in its new season how the covid affects its protagonists, the workers - the virus has not yet reached the television upper classes, you see - of one of those giant US hypermarkets in the Walmart style, this time from Missouri.
The Simpsons
will
also
wear a mask.
In normal times, television fiction strives to create timeless and, preferably, apolitical worlds;
that remind us of ours but at the same time allow us to escape from it.
Now with the pandemic, those aspirations seem to have lost some meaning.
To what extent can each series afford not to talk about the historical year that we are experiencing?
And, in a world where fictions are consumed when the user decides, what reaction will those episodes provoke the day we leave the masks and PCRs behind?
Each title has its answer - how do a series of hospitals, like
Grey's Anatomy,
not treat covid?
Or
The Good Fight
,
which crushes with the injustices of the United States every week? - but the dilemma is a topic of conversation in all the rooms of active Spanish screenwriters.
“The production of the second season of
Mujeres del (h) Ampa
was suspended in March due to confinement, just before filming the final
stretch
of episodes.
So we value making a wink at the pandemic, ”explains Carlos del Hoyo,
showrunner
of the Telecinco series that premiered its second season on Amazon Prime Video last week.
At the end, in one of its last chapters, a character makes fun of another asking him if the coronavirus has passed, because it is seen that he has lost his taste.
There are no more references.
“Any other nod to the pandemic could work against us.
What we want with
Señoras del (h) Ampa
is for people to evade, that is, we have to tiptoe through it ”.
Each series must choose its own path.
“The only obligation is to entertain.
The news programs do have an obligation to tell the reality, but the series can have a function that allows to invent a new reality.
A fiction, let's go ”, defends Darío Madrona, one of the creators of
Elite
, and
showrunner
of One of Us is Lying, for the US platform of NBC.
However, many screenwriters have decided the same: to protect their works from the virus.
The pandemic has been such a brutal change around the world that including it in a plot can absorb the tone and aesthetic of the title in which it appears.
“If you put a topic in a series, it is to enhance it.
This situation is so constant, it makes such a dent in our moods, that it would weaken it, ”responds Alberto Caballero, creator of
La que se avecina
.
“Then there is the issue of masks.
I can't imagine a neighborhood meeting in which everyone is wearing a mask.
85% of the actors' gestures would be lost, which would devour the series ”.
There is another element of rebellion in the resistance to telling stories of the coronavirus in veteran series: fiction is the last thing that humans can control.
"I deny that this is going to settle in our lives as a way of existence," says Caballero.
“One way to win the battle against the virus is to ignore it in fiction.
It is a philosophical question: do people need to see covid in fiction as well?
It's like doing a political comedy.
Spanish politics is already absurd and comic enough.
I don't know what we can contribute to the virus, beyond normalizing it ”.
When 9/11 tore American society apart, several of the series of the moment decided to address it directly.
Others simply portrayed the generalized change in mentality allegorically (in
Friends
, for example, the plots about New York and its policemen were enhanced; the American flags and messages of support for the firefighters hidden in each episode).
“It is important to talk about everything that the virus has changed, and that we must confront.
But not necessarily through a pandemic, ”says Del Hoyo.
"If you have to talk about loss, of moving forward when everyone's life is upset, of people who do not know how to continue after a trauma, that can be counted without showing people confined to their home."