I anxiously clicked on the newly dropped promo for the return of one of my favorite shows. This Is Us has made the world laugh, cry, gasp and feel just about every emotion in between. I’ve loved the intelligent writing, the emotional honesty and strong acting since the first episode. When finally the trailer for season 5 was released, I practically squealed with joy.
And then, about 50 seconds in, I saw it — one of my beloved characters putting on a mask. My body basically recoiled. The shutdown of my brain was swift. Just immediately no. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I thought to myself after finishing the trailer. I don’t know if I can watch my favorite fake people in one of my favorite fake worlds deal with the very real pandemic that is still happening around us. That I’m barely dealing with myself.
I thought back to another show I tried to watch with a friend, Freeform’s Love in the Time of Corona. Starring my absolute King Leslie Odom Jr., I was excited and convinced this show would be cathartic and wonderful. We tried one episode. We hated it. “It’s too much, it’s too real,” my friend and I parroted to each other. I thought I’d like it, but I actually very much don’t want to see the same couple of conversations I myself have been having with family and friends play out on a screen in front of me.
It can’t be ignored, and I get that — I watched a scene from Blackish that was powerful and important. Doctor Bow, spoke to her son about the seriousness of what’s going on in a way I felt many people need to hear. So I get that it’s valuable (and unavoidable), and some series are handling it very well.
But more so I recognized this aversion in myself and asked, “Why? Why am I recoiling? Why do I feel this way?” Perhaps it’s because, right now, it doesn’t feel cathartic to see the characters I love living in such a relatable way.
I find myself thinking, spiraling as if it’s important or really matters at all: How does this affect the plot of the show? The writers couldn’t have written in a pandemic at this time next year because we had no idea it was coming. With a show like This Is Us, where its entirety has been planned from the beginning, with plot points laid in the first season to come to fruition in the final season — how do script additions and changes reflecting the pandemic change the story? What if things go down a path that they weren’t originally intended for?
Perhaps there lies my discomfort, the subconscious yet inevitable question of how this changes my story. There is an intense grief at the disruption to a storyline I thought was somewhat planned out. None of us anticipated this a year ago. It is penciled into no planner, yet here COVID is, invading it’s way into the narrative and changing the script. There are moments for hope, joy and reflection — bright spots to be found — but often there is so much grieving for so many things lost.
I’ve come to know grief quite personally and quite deeply in the last six months. It’s strange how it rears its head as aversion towards Kevin Pearson’s masked face on my television. Life imitates art, right? We take the things we feel and experience, the world going on around us, and translate it into different things. Poems, novels, paintings, plays, movies, tv shows — artists often create things from what’s around them and use the world to inform their message.
So I guess it’s foolish to think the pandemic wouldn’t show up on our favorite sitcoms this season. It’s become a character of its own that transfers network and genre. Would it be weirder, more uncomfortable, for it not to be acknowledged at all? I don’t know. I guess with so much hope and anticipation for a life that was like before, being unable to escape reality even with my favorite show, stings a little extra.
There’s power in acknowledging the fluidity of life — that nothing is really planned, and there’s such beauty in some of the more surprising moments. But there’s also value in being able to name the discomfort, the anger, the sadness, the fatigue that I know I’ve felt flaring up more and more and recognize all these emotions are linked to a deeper grief, a mourning of the loss of the very different lives we thought we’d all be living.
As human beings we grow and adapt, we take what we’re given and learn to move on with it. It’s also OK to sit with the ache of what we miss for a little bit once and awhile. Not to live inside or dwell in them, but to validate the sadness we feel at having to make edits to our storylines no one really wanted. Perhaps they’ll make an even better plot point down the line — we’ll just have to wait and see.