The Pandemic in Popular Culture, Five Years Later

The story of COVID in 7 scenes, from "How To with John Wilson" to "Station Eleven."

It was the sound that truly rattled me. Every two or three minutes during those first weeks of April in 2020, another ambulance would shriek along Ocean Parkway, carrying one more sick person who I imagined could not, try as they might, safely spend another minute at home. Lindsay Zoladz of the New York Times would describe the sound, familiar to every New Yorker in that terrible time, as an expression of grief: “It is as though, around the clock, the city itself were wailing for its sick and dying.”

Upward of 700 New Yorkers were dying of COVID every day in April 2020. Hospitals were quietly parking refrigerated trucks in their parking lots to store the bodies of the dead. The overstretched funeral home down the street from my apartment was piling bodies, one casket atop another, inside its chapel. My friend Jeff, a doctor in Staten Island, was being called back into work to treat sick patients, and he and his wife, also a doctor, sat at their dining-room table one evening, drafting their wills so their children would have caretakers to look after them if they both died.

A few years later, having mostly tried and failed to put the horrors of 2020 out of my mind, I was stopped short by, of all things, an advertisement for the second season of HBO’s magnificent, much-beloved docuseries How to with John Wilson. Over images of disarmingly still New York City streets and flamboyantly decorated outdoor dining sheds, Wilson observed, “You don’t always realize you’re in the middle of history, until it’s over.”

We were all in the middle of history during COVID. And I think, for me, one of the ways in which I summoned the energy to persevere was in the knowledge that, one day, all of these stories would be told.

The truth is, that day has not yet fully arrived. We are probably not yet ready to fully grapple with the scope of what took place in the United States, and around the world, in 2020, and won’t be for some time. We have forgotten what we once knew; we would not have been able to re-elect Donald Trump if we hadn’t.

The story of COVID is definitively not that of the Holocaust, but it might be helpful to remember that the first real artistic depictions of the Shoah, like Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, each came out in the late 1950s, almost 15 years later. But I know that I needed each of those stories we have gotten so far, and hungered for some confirmation of my own experiences. And more are still coming; one of the slow-burn subplots in Max’s riveting The Pitt is about Dr. Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) and his mentor’s death during the pandemic.

Here, then, is the story of COVID in American culture in 7 scenes.

“Risotto,” How to with John Wilson

It was not entirely a surprise that this flabbergastingly idiosyncratic series would come the closest to capturing the feel of a wounded city. Wilson’s docuseries (docu-autobiography? Found-footage masterpiece? Testament to obsessive camera love?) closed out its first season with “How to Cook the Perfect Risotto,” in which Wilson decided to surprise his kindly landlord with a homemade dinner.

Wilson receives an impromptu lesson in Italian cooking from a guy he encounters after spotting a tricolor flag flying outside his home; he lovingly fondles risotto grains after watching a soft-focus chef video; he dumps out a particularly unappetizing attempt into his toilet and flushes it away.

In the midst of Wilson’s comic odyssey for just the right ingredients, the right equipment, and the right recipe, we begin to notice small details creeping in at the margins: the empty city buses, the tables cordoned off with hazard tape at a Burger King, the lines of shopping carts, full of rice and toilet paper, wrapping around a local grocery store. We had been living in history all along.

“Risotto” is the story of COVID in miniature. Here we are, consumed with our petty concerns, only to be sideswiped by the massive oncoming train of the unexpected. And yet, Wilson is not content to leave it at that. We would be redeemed, too, by the ways in which we sought to aid others.

Wilson finally makes a halfway passable risotto, leaving it for his landlord on the landing of their shared stairs during the early weeks of lockdown, together with a lesson for us: “When everything you know has to be thrown out completely, your idea of perfection should probably be thrown out, too.” Wilson, a wizard of found footage, found a way to hold up a mirror for our experiences as we were still living them, shocking us by recognizing what we had gone through in an entirely unexpected place.

Parks and Recreation Reunion Special

The French New Wave filmmaker and critic Jacques Rivette once observed that every film is a documentary about the means of its own production. I thought about that on belatedly watching the Parks and Recreation reunion special that NBC ran in late April 2020. The show was a much-wanted bit of catnip for a desperate audience, eager to tune out their worries for 25 minutes in the company of Leslie Knope.

But as Leslie and April and Ben and Chris take to the screen to sing their ode to miniature horse L’il Sebastian, “5,000 Candles in the Wind,” my brain snagged on the format, and the ways in which this fiction is a documentary of its own making. The characters are appearing in two horizontal arrays of Zoom thumbnails, and we understand that our Pawnee friends are, like us, trapped in their homes. But Leslie Knope is only visible in a Zoom box in Pawnee because Amy Poehler, too, must stay in her home, flatten the curve, and prevent infections from spreading.

The fictional world had to twist itself into the pattern formed by reality, and while we watched, we could not help but find ourselves asking questions the show itself was not intended to raise: How had Retta decided to organize her shoes by color? Where had Rob Lowe gotten the musical instrument on his bookshelf? Our fictional world could no longer, in this painfully fraught moment, separate itself enough from our unbearable reality, and even moments of escape served as reminders that our favorite stars, too, were stuck in purgatory, just as we were.

Inside

The light of a tilted desk lamp bathes Bo Burnham’s face in gold. He is shaggy, bearded, vaguely maniacal, trapped inside what looks like a windowless room. He is, in short, all of us in the midst of a lockdown that seemed as if it might never end. We are at the very outset of Burnham’s comedy-special-cum-musical, Inside, and his ode to white-guy main-character syndrome, “Comedy,” is about to take an unexpected turn at its bridge.

The background music takes on a churchly hue, and Burnham intones words that could either be read as a promise of loyalty, or a damning indictment of one man’s fatal self-absorption: “If you wake up in a house that’s full of smoke, don’t panic, call me and I’ll tell you a joke. If you see white men dressed in white cloaks, don’t panic, call me and I’ll tell you a joke. Oh shit, should I be joking at a time like this? If you start to smell burning toast, you’re having a stroke, or overcooking your toast.”

Burnham scribbles feverishly in his notebook, and covers his face with his hand, overcome with exhaustion, or emotion, or both. Is it a stroke, or just overcooked toast? It is, ultimately, a joke that is also a vow of devotion. We may be every bit as shaggy, bearded, and maniacal as Bo, but he was here to tell us a joke, and would not stop until we were soothed.

Made in its entirety by one man in one room, “Inside” is the exceedingly rare work of comedy that earns every bit of its pathos, finding humor and meaning in our collective unmooring.

At the very end of Inside, Burnham sings under an enormous moon projected above his head, returning to those same lines, and turning them inside out, transforming them into a plea for communion through comedy: “If I wake up in a house that’s full of smoke, I’ll panic, so call me up and tell me a joke.”

I watched Burnham’s special for the first time in August 2021, on my first plane flight since the start of the pandemic. I was en route to see my parents for the first time in almost two years, and attend a close friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, and Burnham’s masterful work hit me hard. We had all been in a house full of smoke, and Burnham had come to tell us the jokes we needed most.

Lenox Hill

For eight episodes, Lenox Hill was a surprisingly affecting Netflix docuseries about doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. We watched as OB-GYNs, neurosurgeons, and ER staff treated some of the most complex and heart-wrenching cases in the hospital. There was never supposed to be a ninth episode. Then COVID struck, and the filmmakers—Adi Barash and Ruthie Shatz—realized they had the opportunity to document a New York City hospital facing the crushing first wave of COVID patients from the inside.

We watch as doctors and administrators and nurses begin to figure out what we already know about the pandemic, in real time. They wipe down office chairs. They adjust newly procured masks. They consult with doctors in China.

In one scene, neurosurgeon Dr. John Boockvar, called in for ER duty, is summoned to see a middle-aged patient whose brain has begun to die after exposure to COVID. The man’s mother is allowed into the hospital, and she asks Boockvar what he would do if it were his son laying in the hospital bed. He calmly and compassionately tells her that it is time for her son to go. But a few minutes later, now on his own, Boockvar repeats the question to himself and loses his composure. It is a profound shock to watch Boockvar, an immensely impressive figure, momentarily overcome with emotion at the prospect of what so many others were experiencing.

We understand that we are watching people who are asked to do the impossible and are finding ways to do it. We also understand that all of this will come at a profound cost.

At the end, the staff gathers outside the hospital, masked and distanced, to honor the memory of the people—patients, family members, fellow hospital workers—who had been killed by COVID. “If we could, we would hug each other, and hold hands, which I promise we will do again,” says the hospital director. “For now, this is a symbolic hug to each other, to our hospital, to our building, to our home.”

The First Wave

Matthew Heineman’s documentary on COVID battering New York City hospitals, covering similar ground to Lenox Hill, ends with a moment of well-earned hope. Ahmed Ellis, a school safety officer, is finally able to leave the hospital after a lengthy stay in the ER, hovering between life and death. Ellis has become a symbol for the hospital workers treating him. A nurse bursts into tears after having to intubate him, remembering him telling her, “I’m so young, and I have a young family. Please don’t let me die.”

Watching the hospital staff gather in the lobby to applaud for Ellis when is finally discharged is beautiful, but Heineman’s camera lingers to watch Ellis struggle to make his way up the front steps of his home, or lift a few fingers in greeting to friends driving by in their cars, overcome with emotion at seeing him back at home.

The person who lingers with me most, though, is the one who doesn’t quite read the room. Pulling up as the feeble Ellis greets his well-wishers, one friend begins shouting jubilantly that he will be taking Ahmed to the club that night to celebrate. Nothing could be less likely, and nothing could be more fervently hoped for, and Heineman’s camera just happens to capture this moment when our wishes crash into our realities. The First Wave grants us this moment of hope, but demands that we understand just how much has been taken away from even those patients lucky enough to survive.

Station Eleven

A disaffected young man named Jeevan (Himesh Patel) encounters a child actor named Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) on the night a flu pandemic descends on Chicago. Kirsten is unable to return home after her friend and mentor collapses onstage and dies mid-performance. Jeevan tries to dispatch Kirsten to someone—anyone—but eventually brings her to his brother’s apartment, far above the streets of Chicago.

The two lose each other in the chaos of the earliest days of the pandemic, and twenty years pass. Kirsten, now played by Mackenzie Davis, is drawn toward acting as a means of grappling with the unknown, and Jeevan is pulled in the direction of caring for others, as he had once cared for Kirsten, on a night long ago.

The HBO adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel is not officially about COVID, of course; and yet, how could it have been received as anything other when it was released in December 2021? With COVID still keeping us away from our friends and family members, nothing—nothing! —could have been more powerful than the idea of a reunion with those we loved and missed. We were all Ahmed Ellis’ too-excitable friend now.

When Kirsten and Jeevan find each other again, at the very end of the final episode of Station Eleven, it is among the truly sublime moments in recent television. Kirsten is now looking after a young girl much like she had once been looked after. Jeevan, snowy-haired, is the closest thing the benighted world now has to a doctor. When they spot each other across the room at a concert where a singer and tuba player are performing “Midnight Train to Georgia,” they approach each other warily, as if unsure the other person could be real, after so much time has passed. Kirsten attempts to speak, but fails. The two hug each other warily, then fulsomely, Kirsten tucking her chin into Jeevan’s shoulder. They both cry, and so do we.

Every Minute Is a Day

This one isn’t a movie or a TV show, but a book—written by Robert Meyer, a doctor at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, along with his cousin Dan Koeppel, a journalist for The Wirecutter. The book is an astonishingly detailed, day-by-day journey through the first months of the pandemic at a frontline hospital.

There are countless scenes that could have been slotted in here, not least among them Meyer’s visits to a frail older mentor who has to be taken in to the hospital under heartbreaking circumstances (shades of The Pitt), but the moment that sticks with me from this remarkable book is the one in which the ER’s director, Dr. Deb White, has to check her elderly father into the hospital, suspecting that both he and her mother have COVID.

“When they pull up at the emergency room doors, Deb is standing inside, waiting with our colleague Mark Fenig…. Deb’s father is in immediate need, with labored breathing, and Mark asks his boss what she wants him to do. Deb’s instant reply: ‘I’m not the doctor here.’ .…Another emergency room director might have pulled rank, but Deb believes that if you trust someone enough to hire them to be responsible for the lives of strangers, you should also trust them with the life of somebody you care about.”

I’ve never met Dr. White, but I have thought countless times about this moment, of having to bring in your elderly parents to be treated at the very hospital in which you work, and of being willing to trust your colleagues with the lives of your family members in the worst possible moments of your life. It is a vision of solidarity under duress that speaks to some of our most firmly held ideals, as Americans and as human beings.

This moment sticks with me for one more reason: as it happens, White’s colleague Mark Fenig is one of my oldest, dearest friends. This book is not about Mark—he is only a supporting, somewhat quirky character in someone else’s story—but this moment is here forever, for readers to discover what Mark, and countless people just like him, were asked to do when we needed them most. We may not be quite ready to remember, but I hope that we never forget.

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Ministry Book Corner 📚

Here at MOPC, not only are we pop culture writers, we’re also authors! Every Monday, we’re going to recommend each other’s work. And if you’d like to check out all of our books, visit our bookstore at Bookshop.org.

Jennifer recommends … Saul’s Sitcom: A History from I Love Lucy to Community

Kirkus called it “astute and brimming with information,” and I call it a thorough history of a form so many of us take for granted, the situation comedy. Saul makes the point early and often that the sitcom is a meta-art form, and this book takes that idea a step further, going behind the meta of the meta. It also helps us understand a format that has shaped so many of our lives, reminding us that it didn’t have to look exactly the way it does, and outlining the forces that made it so. Saul would go on to write the excellent Generation Friends, bringing together so many of the early forces he outlines here. It’s fun even to read the chapters about sitcoms you’ve never watched and never will (hello, The Phil Silvers Show!). It’s also worth mentioning that I met Saul because of this book—he was promoting this while I was promoting my book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, about The Mary Tyler Moore Show. People couldn’t stop putting us on panels together, and I don’t regret it for a moment.