Watching “Schitt’s Creek,” a pre-pandemic Canadian production that has become a binge staple in millions of mid-pandemic U.S. households, you may find something odd happening around the middle of Season 3. The motel room where much of it takes place starts to remind you, with every new exterior establishing shot, that you’re in lockdown, in late 2020, watching a comedy of confinement. This is getting away from it all?
I like and occasionally love “Schitt’s Creek,” but it’s no wonder many of the same millions have fallen for “The Queen’s Gambit,” the seven-part streaming phenomenon also on Netflix. It offers so many things our lives right now are not: rangy, globe-trotting, a triumph over adversity. We’re still in the muddling-through phase. Some of our fellow citizens are still in the mask-optional phase.
Evoking the image recycled by so many old Westerns, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in early November: “The cavalry is coming.” The COVID-19 vaccine race looks promising indeed. As if she hadn’t done enough for us as a nation already, Dolly Parton invested $1 million in the development of Moderna’s vaccine. I seriously love the idea of Parton, a generous, philanthropic, shining star of music, movies and a theme park, becoming the emblem of a corner being turned. She might achieve the impossible: uniting America in, yes, a triumph over adversity.
Meantime: I screen, you screen, we all screen till our eyes scream.
Some of us look backward, not just to stories such as “The Queen’s Gambit” taking us away from 2020 but to TV shows that were huge a few years back, and are happily new to a new generation.