Half a dozen Top Chef contestants race through an empty Whole Foods store, wantonly sniffing produce with unmasked faces and grabbing jars with ungloved hands. Returning to cook in a crowded kitchen, they jostle each other and exchange sweaty hugs and high-fives. They’re prepping food for a restaurant crammed with patrons, who clink their glasses together, sample morsels from each others’ plates, and spray invisible aerosolized particles into the air as they chatter and laugh.
This episode was filmed in Los Angeles last fall, months before the lockdown, when only scientists were familiar with terms like aerosolization. No one back then could have imagined that restaurants all across the country (including those of Top Chef head judge Tom Colicchio) would soon be subject to an existential threat. On the screen, there is no hint of the health catastrophe, not to mention the harrowing social unrest. Watching Top Chef—and most any show shot before the COVID-19 crisis—entices us into an alternative universe. “The past is a foreign country,” wrote the British novelist L.P. Hartley. “They do things differently there.” How we used to live became freakishly unfamiliar within a matter of weeks; actions once taken for granted now bearing the painful pang of the possibly lost forever.
The idea of television as escapism is a tired trope, especially in this golden age of dark, challenging, must-endure series. But as the strictures of social distancing kicked in, I found that I was using TV to luxuriate in the social freedom and casual physical interactions as much as I was paying attention to dialogue and plot.
Like a lot of people, I’m bingeing on old favorites, seeking the solace of familiarity. Rewatching Broad City has become a portal to a carefree world that may never completely return. The show’s heroines, Abbi and Ilana, are two of the most joyfully tactile characters in TV history. They treat the streets of New York City like a giant jungle gym. In one episode, the duo navigate their way through a crowded summertime subway train, gracefully dodging break-dancers, sweaty armpits, and crotch grabbers. In another, Ilana takes the idea of WeWork one step further by renting out a desk plonked on a street corner. “If parkour is using the city as your gym,” she says, “SheWork is using the city as your office.” Similarly, I’ve been bathing in the friendship of Issa Rae’s Insecure posse as they dance and laugh and eat out, slipping from backyard to restaurant to club in Los Angeles. Never has the pleasure of aimlessly hanging out en masse seemed so thrilling, so exotic—and so bygone.
Curb Your Enthusiasm is another show that brings back the pleasures of carelessly roaming through L.A. That was always a privilege afforded only certain people, of course. But now that wandering unguardedly in public spaces is charged with danger for everyone, Larry David’s flaneur-style mobility seems ultra-dreamy. A man with no genuine problems, David’s character on Curb turns Los Angeles into a theater for micro-anxieties: He bickers over scones that are too moist, people who try too many ice cream samples, doctors who won’t let him use the exam-room phone. Watching the show now, trapped in my own L.A. house for months, the trivial plotlines drop away and it becomes a virtual reality drift along sun-dappled city streets with Larry and his manager, Jeff, popping in and out of cafés and parties as if it’s no big thing. Watching pre-lockdown TV has become more than just a nostalgic escape from a tense and trapped present. It’s a way to keep myself in shape for the contact sport of life as it used to be and, if we’re fortunate, will be again.
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