66 THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020
discussed the aesthetics of breaking news,
the almost-camp spectacle apparently
required for the circulation of informa-
tion in dire times.
The entire country is now red. The
pandemic has jammed the churn of so-
cial life, pausing human interaction in
medias res. Theatres, concert venues, and
cinemas have closed. Restaurants in New
York are open only for takeout and de-
livery. What else is there to do but watch
TV? Friends ask for recommendations.
(“High Maintenance” if you’re missing
your neighbors; “The Leftovers” if you’re
a masochist.) I quite liked “Devs,” a bru-
tally elegant work of science fiction, set
in a jaundiced San Francisco in the near
future, and would have reviewed it, had
the world not changed.
It has been a long time since “tele-
vision” conjured the box around which
families once gathered to watch “The
Ed Sullivan Show” or to first glimpse
the surface of the moon; in this cen-
tury, it encompasses whatever can be
streamed via a Roku, a PlayStation, or
an iPhone. But this crisis has already
created a culture. As we self-isolate, the
Internet has become host to an ambi-
ent, crowdsourced documentary of the
time, and video is the anxious medium
of social life. On Instagram, a friend
has shared communiqués from a young
doctor telling New Yorkers what to do
if they experience shortness of breath.
The illustrator Wendy MacNaughton
begins her daily drawing classes on In-
stagram Live by stretching to Madness’s
“Our House”; John Legend streamed
a live concert from his living room with
his wife, Chrissy Teigen, perched on
the piano. The migration of social ac-
tivities to the Internet predates our cur-
rent emergency by decades, but live
streaming, which once seemed to pres-
age the dissolution of human intimacy,
now looks like its preservation.
I’ve also watched many hours of ac-
tual TV. Days before the general pub-
lic seemed to understand how social dis-
tancing could help “flatten the curve,”
shows made a display of responsible cit-
izenship. The sudden absence of live
in-studio audiences was pleasingly ab-
surd. “Welcome to ‘The View’!” Whoopi
Goldberg shouted, eight times, to no
one, during a live taping. Subbing for
Jimmy Kimmel, Pete Buttigieg was a
shy but game entertainer-politician,
delivering an opening monologue to
his husband, Chasten, and a handful of
“Kimmel” team members. He roasted the
Trumps, implored vigilance in the face
of the pandemic, and interviewed Pat-
rick Stewart, sharing a photo of himself
as a child in a Starfleet uniform. But, as
the week went on, resilience seemed to
waver. Joy Behar, who is seventy-seven,
announced that she would stop coming
to tapings of “The View.”
I am not the first person to find that
the most innocuous aspects of TV
watching now induce a reflexive unease.
On “American Idol,” the hosts’ displays
of consolation toward eliminated con-
testants, conveyed through the rubbing
of the singers’ shoulders, made me ner-
vous. Earlier this month, watching “The
Bachelor,” I had been annoyed by Pe-
ter’s disrespect of Hannah Ann; two
weeks ago, I couldn’t stand the inces-
sant stroking of faces. Commercials ad-
vertising fast food are orgiastic displays
of careless skin contact. In the U.K.,
KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” ads have
been pulled.O
n Sunday, after the Diocese of
Brooklyn announced the suspen-
sion of Mass, I watched a service streamed
from the St. James Cathedral Basilica,
on the New Evangelization Television
channel. At any other time, the empty
pews would have offered further proof
of the institution’s decline. Later that
day, driving up Flatbush Avenue for
last-minute provisions, I watched a
woman run across the street to a store-
front black church, where members of
the congregation were dancing and
sweating in close quarters. In the eve-
ning, the Democratic Presidential de-
bate felt like a consummation of the in-
evitable. The podiums were six feet apart;
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders greeted
each other with an elbow bump. After
Sanders challenged Biden on his health-
care policy, Biden said that he didn’t
want to get into a “back-and-forth, in
terms of our politics,” and exploited a
hunger for stirring rhetoric. “We are at
war with a virus,” he said.
On March 12th, “The Late Show
with Stephen Colbert” announced that
it would stop production altogether.
Four days later, when New York State
banned gatherings of more than fifty
people, Colbert surprised viewers witha monologue recorded in his bathtub.
Immersed in bubbles, fully suited, he
provided his signature mix of acid cri-
tique and avuncular reassurance. The
segment—which was followed by a
rerun—looked like it was filmed with
an iPhone. “Hey, everybody! Hi!” Col-
bert said. “Welcome to my bathroom.”
These days, theatrics make public
figures seem untrustworthy; the real he-
roes have no need for laurels. At press
conferences, governors and mayors have
mostly abandoned speechifying in favor
of flat statements. Andrew Cuomo, the
governor of New York, in a brown leather
jacket and a white baseball cap, is a steady-
ing figure. But even President Trump
has dialled down the bombast. Sweat-
ing and breathing heavily as he pro-
nounced from the Oval Office that
America would beat the coronavirus, he
appeared to represent the ailing global
gerontocracy. “I will always put the well-
being of America first,” he said earlier
this month. Last week, he seemed to
have ceded the role of steward to An-
thony Fauci, the director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Dis-
eases. Fauci has appeared on Sunday talk
shows and CNN panels, and is now a
comforting presence at Trump pressers,
standing to the side, taking questions
from reporters after Trump and Mike
Pence rattle off their false promises. The
President claimed that the pandemic was
under “tremendous control”; on CNN’s
“State of the Union,” Fauci straightfor-
wardly contradicted him. “People some-
times think that you’re overreacting,”
Fauci said. “I like it when people are
thinking I’m overreacting, because that
means we’re doing it just right.”
A small, seventy-nine-year-old pub-
lic servant who barely clears the lectern,
Fauci has a distaste for drama, and em-
anates authority. The President, who
initially told the public that the coro-
navirus would go away, “like a miracle,”
seemed, last Tuesday, temporarily cowed
by Fauci’s presence. The next day, Trump
told the reporter Yamiche Alcindor that
it was correct to call the coronavirus
“kung flu” and the “Chinese virus.” The
racism is tactical, a diversion from the
Administration’s failures. More embar-
rassingly, it is also a way of shifting at-
tention from Fauci, who, Trump was
forced to concede, had become “a major
television star.”