That story is there, but there’s terrible melancholy in the situation of Samantha (Sofia Black-D’Elia), a 28-year-old who used to have a career at a hip online media company. There are elements of Single Drunk Female (streams Disney+ in Canada) that are clearly not just about a woman who has a drinking problem and must get sober. He hallucinates the worst things, but we all do that in our own way, having seen our world turned around and made small with lightning speed.
While Barry the character is a hitman who wants to be an actor, and there’s very dark humour in that, Barry is also an everyman feeling defeated and depleted. Not to include masks and vaccinations, but to capture the morbidly unsettling sense of things left undone, of boredom becoming rage and the need to find a new role to play in this new universe of uncertainty. Co-creator and star Bill Hader had every episode script rewritten.
#THE MELANCHOLY OF ALL THINGS DONE LEADERS SERIES#
The series was about to begin shooting its third season when the pandemic halted production.
That’s all of us, worried we’re trapped in isolation forever now, and trying to get back to normality, yet failing.īarry (HBO, streams Crave) is now imbued with mind-numbing frustration about understanding the world we’re living in and its rules.
Key character Helly (Britt Lower) keeps trying to quit and leave the office, but can’t. The tiny group of characters who work together in an antiseptic office space are proxies for viewers who have tried to find genuine connections while in isolation. But it has so many other underlying themes that resonate.
#THE MELANCHOLY OF ALL THINGS DONE LEADERS TV#
It’s more like an accumulation of moods, and a deep sense of vulnerability particularly, is washing over a set of TV dramas.Ĭatch up on the best streaming TV of 2021 with our holiday guideĪn example is Severance (streams Apple TV+), which can be taken at its surface – a paranoid thriller about a conformist corporate culture, the enemy of individuality. It’s not that the COVID-19 experience as illness or epidemic is being confronted blatantly. There’s melancholy all over the place, as characters worry about unforeseen change, isolation and the struggle to adapt to change. An atmosphere of stagnation and fear has crept in. What we’re seeing now is the real and sometimes unnerving impact of the COVID-era on television narratives. The BBC’s Staged was also archetypal, with actors David Tennant and Michael Sheen playing versions of themselves, trying to prepare a project while in lockdown and using video-conference technology to connect. HBO’s Coastal Elites was typical: A collection of linked monologues filmed in quarantine, it arrived looking like the work of theatre it was originally supposed to be. The new experience of lockdowns and the strange connectivity offered by technology formed a baseline for storytelling. Societal change following mass death was a running premise. Searching for parallels to an event unprecedented in recent times, the source material mined by writers was the impact of the bubonic plague that devastated Europe in the 14th century. When the first wave of this pandemic era’s storytelling arrived, across many genres, the plague theme was dominant.
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