Have you been watching a show or movie recently and thought to yourself, “Why aren’t they wearing masks? Why are they standing so close to each other?” Even when you know the show has been filmed well before the pandemic began, it’s somehow become a reflex. But that won’t happen if you watch season five of This Is Us, because the pandemic exists in the show.
This Is Us, though set in several different time periods, technically takes place in modern day 2020. The first episode of season five, which aired two weeks ago, doesn’t take long to show the audience that it will, in fact, be addressing the current state of the world.
The episode takes place in the spring of 2020, so the characters are a bit further behind in the pandemic’s development than we as the viewers are. Immediately following the recap of last season, a character reveals a piece of shocking but good news, and then says, “It feels like this is all happening just as the world is falling apart, you know?”
In the following scene, there is a discussion of various potential information of how the virus can spread, calling us back to before we knew both the seriousness of COVID-19 and the best ways to prevent it. There is also a scene in which some characters learn that Tom Hanks tested positive, arguably the first prominent celebrity to have coronavirus— a piece of news that feels distant to us now.
It’s less than four minutes into the episode when a character first appears wearing a mask. Kevin goes to his sister Kate’s house to tell her some important news. He wears a mask as he walks up to her front door, and then the two discuss how far away from her he should stand in the front yard while they talk.
There are countless other scenes in the episode in which characters are wearing masks or casually discussing the pandemic. And there’s something so strange about seeing it normalized on television.
On the one hand, the characters on the show handle the situation very responsibly, providing a good message for the audience. Every character wears their mask properly, and the only times characters aren’t wearing one is if they are in their house or outside, clearly at a great distance from other characters. Any time a character sees someone not from their household without social distancing, they first discuss how they either quarantined for two weeks or got tested multiple times beforehand.
But on the opposite end of the spectrum, it still feels surreal to see the pandemic normalized in fictionalized television. Back when all of this began, we thought it would be over fairly quickly. Seeing it on a TV show (and not a new one whose main plot revolves around the pandemic) both proves how long it has already gone on for and implies that it is not going away anytime soon. Both of those statements are still sometimes scary to think about.
Despite how unsettling the initial moments feel, you begin to get used to seeing the pandemic on screen as the episode goes on in the same way we’ve gotten used to seeing the pandemic in our real lives. I don’t like using the term “new normal,” because even though it’s become normalized, nothing about this is normal.
But in a way, it’s reassuring that these characters are going through the same things we are. They’re surviving it just like the rest of us.
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