In the episode Delete All Future Events, Ike (Mike Colter) an alcoholic, has a few months of sobriety under his belt when the lockdown hits and his girlfriend leaves him. The isolation hits twice as hard for someone in recovery. Just focus on you, his Alcoholics Anonymous friend Gene (Steven Weber) urges him over FaceTime. If I focus on me any more, Im going to get myself pregnant, Ike answers.
Like other quarantine productions, Social Distancing has to accommodate the limitations of stitching together a lot of solo scenes. I found myself springing uneasily to attention when two actors shared physical space, a learned reflex from months of epidemiological stranger danger.
Sometimes Social Distance relies on family ties to get actors safely in the same scene, like the real-life married couple Becky Ann and Dylan Baker, playing retirees discovering that their life goals have drifted apart. (Connecting does likewise with the wife and husband Knox and Powell, who shot scenes in their home.)
But Social Distance uses the limitations as a creative spur, grasping at all the platforms people use to connect virtually not just Zoom but also online video games, TikToks, Grindr and stitching them together into a new storytelling form. (Connecting is less far-reaching in its use of formats, but it does manage to make an ersatz hangout of a virtual-reality poker room.)
The narrative form says something about life in quarantine, but it also captures digital life in 2020 generally. The season is organized chronologically, and as it moves forward the stories become less exclusively about the pandemic, just as life itself did with time.
The final episode, about Black video technicians setting up to shoot a virtual graduation for a largely white prep school, focuses on the racial-justice protests after the killing of George Floyd (which also comes up in Connecting, more jarringly).read more
In Shows Like ‘Social Distance,’ TV Learns to Work From Home
