Covid-Cinema: Part IV, “Staged” and “Love in the Time of Corona”

Creatives find a way. Even under the most unprecedented circumstances with in-person acting mostly shutdown, a handful of television producers adapted – rather quickly – to creating wholly original shows to air within a few months of their filming by relying on self-taping with minimal but safe contact, and video conferencing programs. 

Staged was put together by British artists, released first on BBC-One in June and then available on Hulu last month, while Love in the Time of Corona was put together in Los Angeles, initially released on the cable channel Freeform and then also available on Hulu back in August. 

Both incorporate the then current events and sense of experiencing the pandemic from March through May 2020, featuring adults in their homes separated in distance but coming together over the video conferencing program Zoom, and video phone apps like FaceTime. 

Taking inspiration from social media trends and whatever other sources showed what people were doing, thinking, and feeling while in quarantine, Staged and Love in the Time of Corona are the most immediately reflective of the pandemic, providing the first fictionalized window of core Covid-Cinema titles. 

Love in the Time of Corona shows how as the day’s routine and all future plans had been immediately disrupted, four households of people in different living situations found ways to cope; but glossed over any real conflict or what health dangers can come from contracting the virus. 

Home #1: James is a full-time member of Spike Lee’s film production team, and his wife Sade had put her career track on hold to stay home with their 3-year old daughter. With the indefinite time to be home, James reflects on his once busy and travel-filled schedule and Sade considers taking this indefinite time to have another baby. They are in love and happily married, but they experience a range of different and changing ideals on how to live moving forward; eventually overcoming their miscommunications and coming to a compromise. 

Home #2: James’ elderly mother Nanda lives comfortably as well, but is separated from her ailing husband Charles as he’s cared for in a nearby nursing home. They have their dinners together over video, talking about their upcoming anniversary party’s plans. Their younger son Dedrick comes to live with Nanda for additional help, staying in the guest house. But as Charles’ condition worsens from Alzheimer’s, remembering their sons and figuring out how to make amends from their old confrontations becomes even more challenging.   

Home #3: Even though Paul and Sarah have been separated for months, when their college-aged daughter Sophie is forced out of school to spend quarantine at home, they pretend to still be together; forcing Paul to hide his new girlfriend Gigi with clandestinely taken phone calls. Sophie’s boyfriend was supposed to also stay with them but he broke up with her instead. And just when Sarah was going to resume her travel-writing career, a long-planned trip (with corresponding article) to Italy had to be cancelled. In their quarantine, Paul and Sarah had time to discuss what transpired in their marriage to break it apart, eventually resolving that separation and divorce were no longer the right answer, and they should stay together. 

Home #4: Best friends and single roommates Elle and Oscar live in the Hollywood Hills. The former a singer-songwriter and the latter a fashion stylist, they decide the best use of their time should be spent more intensely online dating. Oscar finds love with Sean, and over the course of their virtual-only connection’s relationship arc allows them to more honestly express their needs, wants, vulnerabilities, strengths and weaknesses. Meanwhile Elle alternates between her feelings for Oscar and Adam, the “hot shower guy” who is renovating the house next door and (against her first impression) not only knows how to read but recommends Normal People by Sally Rooney. 

In the final episode’s last moments, Nanda is outside her husband’s nursing home window as a car-parade passes by honking horns, with signs and decorations for the anniversary party they couldn’t have in-person. In the line are Paul, Sarah, and Sophie who have known Nanda as Sophie’s beloved former teacher. And flying above them, is the plane Sean hired for Oscar, pulling a banner with “You Can’t Quarantine Love”. 

The 4-episode show weaves between the households and characters’ dramas. It is reminiscent of the more recently popular Gary Marshall movies Valentine’s Day (2010), New Year’s Eve (2011), and Mother’s Day (2016) but even more similar to the smaller scale indie film, What’s Cooking (2000). Featuring four Los Angeles families’ households of different ethnicities and life circumstances as they prepare Thanksgiving dinner, it’s revealed towards the end they all live in the same neighborhood and must come together when someone faces harm. 

Love in the Time of Corona takes jabs at the sourdough bread-making craze, copies the TikTok video dances, the DIY masks, the improvised vacation-like family night, the loss of normal college-life independence, the Zoom meeting and dating fails, and the daily nothingness routines. 

Filmed over a few weeks in July but focused on the March/April/May time when the pandemic and quarantine-living were still ‘new’, the household stories stayed on the positive side of things with only rote mention of how the prediction that “200,000 people could die (which has sadly come true) ...disproportionately affecting Black and Brown and poor communities” and later on in episode 3, the breaking news of the released shocking video how Black man Ahmaud Arbery had been killed by two white men while jogging back in February. 

Even though each day’s news felt like too much to incorporate, and that the production had to tone-down a racially-focused scene (per the LA Times), Love in the Time of Corona ultimately failed to show the real-life diverse experiences and emotions people have been experiencing in the pandemic. Not one character questions whether or not they’ll be able to keep their job, keep their health insurance, or have enough money to pay their bills. We know that Nanda is a retired teacher living off her good benefits and Paul was his family’s breadwinner, but James and Sade’s reliance upon his work in film production, Dedrick’s struggling music aspirations as well as Oscar and Elle’s gig economy salaries should have weighed heavy on their minds, in their conversations, and given them severe anxiety! And yet not one expressed actual worry or concern for their livelihoods! 

What’s even more unrealistic is that by its end, the households have been so isolated from the outside and other people is that they barely remember that getting sick is easy and happening to millions of people across the world. Over their daily video chat, for however long they’ve already been talking about her problems with James, Sade barely noticed Adeah laying in bed, without her usual full face of makeup and hair done, wrapped in a robe, and then has the audacity to casually ask her, “How are you?...Why are you coughing?” to which Adeah replies with the same nonchalant tone, “Okay, now don’t be worried, I got ‘the-rona’…They (meaning Urgent Care) said I just gotta ride it out, that I’ll be fine.” Adeah rolls out the list of her symptoms, “fever, chills, headache, exhaustion, no trouble breathing yet but they said it could take a turn for the worse in week 2” and then proceeds to complain about her recent break-up with the guy she’d quarantined with.

How dare their conversation be written and directed in this way! Where is the compassion and understanding for what someone experiences in the throws of Covid-19? Adeah telling Sade not to worry, despite having all those symptoms, feeling those aches, and the very likely possibility of her breathing getting worse, which may require going to the hospital to be put on a ventilator – if there is even an available hospital bed for her! 

Of all the choices for creating characters, not one was considered “essential” (except the barely seen Nurse at Charles’ side): the people and services forced to continue so that the privileged can just Netflix-and-chill. Maybe that was harshly worded, but the show did not focus on those in the medical field, grocery-store or other retail employees, delivery services, educators, infrastructure and critical trades, etc. They did not include any sound effects of an ambulance’s siren racing through their neighborhoods! It is disheartening despite well-meaning intentions. 

While Love in the Time of Corona’s mission was supposed to be inclusive, Staged made no such pretense. Sharing similar qualities of inherent privilege and wealth, creators Simon Evans and Phin Glynn had made their episodic Zoom play for the purpose of keeping busy during their UK quarantine with iconic actors David Tennant and Michael Sheen at their access and other supporting cast members; all portraying alternative/heightened versions of themselves. 

Not that I am trying to give Staged a so-called pass for not including the things I criticized Love in the Time Corona for but rather those same points of dislike cannot be similarly applied to Staged. 

David and Michael have already known each other from previous collaborations in Good Omens (2019 TV), and maybe as far back from both working in Bright Young Things (2003). Playing frenemies throughout Staged allowed them to poke fun at their renown reputations, their professional methodology, and their artistic temperaments, as well as to also comment on their at-home lives as fathers and husbands. 

David asks Michael what the Welsh word for the end-of-the-world might be, and Michael tangents into a reenactment of his BBC radio performance of Dylan Thomas’ poem (that I previously quoted in the Vivarium blog post) “Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” and then exclaiming the Welsh translation of “Cachu Hwch” which means “total fucking disaster”. 

Michael and David have grown-out their hair and are wearing comfortable lounge-around clothing. David sits on his bed, resting his head on his arm and stares into the camera. Michael sits upright in the dining chair with head thrown backwards so he is staring at the ceiling. Their split video screens are next to each other but edited so that one disappears then reappears as the opening credits appear then disappear. Then even as Michael and David’s conversation is still heard, there are similarly split screen videos of major tourist attractions in London completely empty of crowds and long winding country roads. Their sleepy yet pensive conversation continues as a melancholy turned light jazz piano theme plays, composed by Alex Baranowski. It’s clear this show was constructed to entertainingly kill all the time left in the world. 

You can tell Michael and David’s character versions have already started to unravel from just trying to keep slogging through the weeks of the uncertainty and the isolation; a window into the world of actors without getting to act. Most actors experience lulls between their jobs, but since these stars have not had much of one recently, it is a complete shock to their systems having such indefinite downtime. They reverted to their inner turmoils and insecurities. (The meta moment for the audience, is realizing that Staged’s versions of David and Michael are behaving adrift and cranky from not working – but in actuality the real David and Michael are working on Staged with all their talented focus.) 

…Then, enter Simon from screen left! 

With the West End theaters all closed for quarantine, green-to-the-scene director Simon was supposed to have his big-break directing David and Michael in Six Characters in Search of an Author. Rather than wasting away on a couch leaning into the abyss, he takes the opportunity (to crash at his sister’s empty Oxford estate) for their continuing rehearsals over Zoom. “I’m not ready to give up on this yet. What if we spend two or three hours a day discussing the play, then when the theaters reopen we’ve got something to go, everyone else waits six weeks, we swan into town: the British public will need entertainment.” 

David privately consults his wife Georgia as the children scream out for their attention from upstairs and their dining room table is covered in toys, folded laundry, dishes and mugs. Georgia approves, saying it could be a good distraction and keep him from going mad. Then David must convince Michael. Within moments of getting back on video-chat together, another conversation ensues of showing each other up over their morning art projects (David’s pencil sketch of a pineapple versus Michael’s acrylic painting landscape masterpiece), their Scottish vs. Welsh ancestries, Michael’s fear about the birds outside his window, and various great Literature’s authors. David finally gets around to asking Michael to join him and Simon on virtual rehearsals, but convincing him requires playing to his ego with some lies that Simon had previously Michael’s performance in Hamlet. 

Meanwhile Simon’s younger sister has returned to her own home, catching Simon hooking up his computer and wearing her pink bathrobe (like an extra layer of pajamas). As we’ve seen David and Michael’s sibling-like bickering and bantering, we’re introduced to Simon and Lucy’s actual sibling relationship with their own squabbling style. When she says, “I’m four years younger than you and this is not how grown-ups talk…I age in dog-years when I’m around you!” and further accuses Simon of lying about David Tennant calling him, has to back down when Simon answers but mutes David. When Simon says, “I’m supposed to be rehearsing a play with him, it’s been cancelled because of all this. I think I can save the project but I need somewhere to do it from and I can’t stay in London…I don’t have any money” it’s the first expression of worry that had he not escaped to his sister’s house, he might have been evicted for not paying rent. Or at the very least wouldn’t survive quarantine with their parents. She looks away when she says he can’t stay with her but when he looks at her with sad puppy eyes saying “Pleeasse”, she must have relented off-camera because they roommate for the duration of the story – still acting like their adult-child sibling selves throughout. 

For the next four episodes, it is a constant struggle for David and Michael to concentrate or have faith in Simon’s directing capabilities, even interrupted by a conflict with the play’s originally cast actor for Michael’s part, Samuel L. Jackson. After too many hurt feelings and a few three-way call tricks, all comes to a head when in Episode 6 the play’s financier Jo calls upon a revered thespian for a favor as the last Hail Mary to snap these boys back into the project: the cussing national treasure Dame Judi Dench. Her wonderfully unexpected self exclaims to a stunned David and Michael: “You said yes…then stop fucking about! We’re actors. When we say ‘yes’ we do the bloody job”. She figuratively drops mic by literally hanging up the video call, leaving Michael and David to rightly fix their attitudes and get on with their proper rehearsals. 

It's only outside-world sub-plot is Michael's love-hate affections for his elderly lady neighbor. She blackmailed him into helping her with easy favors when she caught him trying to put his bottles of wine in her recycling collection bins. Michael frets wondering how she might be, having seen her taken to the hospital for coronavirus treatment, and only relaxes when the lady's son comes by to give him an update. This whole matter is unseen and only relayed in a conversation with David over video-chat, but it's just compassionately expressed enough to be as similar to how any one of the audience might react to witnessing an acquaintance's experience. Or, if someone in David or Michael's family had instead been the character getting sick, either performer would rightfully play that mournful loss to the point of devastation.

These six episodes were so well-crafted and executed that it feels so real; as if all of their recorded video conversations were leaked for the world to see. The material is not forcefully performed. And it’s not trying to make a statement. However, it would've been just as well-done if the character Michael had indeed been played by legendary Samuel L. Jackson.

Conclusion

Staged was not meant to show interconnected diverse experiences of the populace as how Love in the Time of Corona wanted to, but rather to show one interconnected pod’s experience.