Perhaps you have seen this or maybe you haven’t. But there has been a tag at the end of all of the FOX game shows that have aired this year and after the pandemic started in 2020 about the fake audiences that they have been using. Well, shows like The Masked Singer and The Masked Dancer talk some about the fans at home voting. They are an unseen, virtual audience that makes sense to have during this time, but we are focused on the stock footage that they use of old audience members from previous seasons of lucky people who get their seconds of fame, sometimes more than once as I have even picked up some on the footage that was reused more than once.
But this is a problem to me. I mean, I know I seem to complain too much in this blog about things, but bear with me. Too many people want to pretend that life either is or can be normal right now despite the pandemic. Game shows that seem to have the same live studio audience that we are used to seeing usually (which literally is something we could very well have seen before with all the recycled footage being used right now) and it makes it seem like we should be living our normal lives now instead of trying to be safer and preventing us from getting coronavirus.
The other problem isn’t so much the number of shows that have mentioned the pandemic (which at this point could only be this pandemic and none of the others) but some that make it seem like there was never anything different after it. Big Sky has talked some about a pandemic on and off, but they have never shown any of the characters in face masks. It is hardly alone in that regard. Maybe they are just trying to think of an ideal world where the pandemic is part of the past and we don’t need face masks anymore (although I’m keeping mine for when there is colder weather again to keep my face cool). But to given even fleeting mentions of a pandemic on and off while making little to no effort to make it seem like it was ever a pandemic world seems troublesome to me from a narrative standpoint.
What else is there to say? I guess that I shouldn’t be too hard on TV for still giving us some of the normal programming that we are used to with sacrificing too much for how the world is different now. But I do wish that they could just show the empty studios and admit that things are different now. Or they don’t have to be in a world where the pandemic ever happened at all. I just know that it can be too weird for some shows to go on as if this post-pandemic world were already here.
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