Netflix’s SocialDistance Cuts Too Close to Home: TV Review
anthology series comprised of short vignettes of life in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S., presents critics as well as viewers with a conundrum. On the one hand, it is, in the main, unimpeachably made: Using isolation-appropriate technology like Zoom and Nest cameras to tell what are generally sweet and thoughtful little tales of human connection, or disconnection, at a time of crisis, the show is a worthy use of Netflix resources.
To wit: The show’s eight episodes take place entirely in the months of April and May of this year; not that things are good today, but the early days of confusing misinformation and early attempts to come to terms with how we were forced to live now were misery. This viewer felt a painful, tooth-grinding familiarity at jokes about a relative being accidentally muted in one episode, which takes place during a Zoom funeral.
So it goes throughout the first six episodes: Frank and open-hearted conversations that tend to deliver us to a terminus we might have reasonably expected. This show is created by “Orange Is the New Black” writer Hilary Weisman Graham and executive-produced by Jenji Kohan, and it shares “Orange’s” impulse towards wringing something of worth out of national cataclysm.
Creative though the means of depicting these lives through consumer technology is, it also exposes each story’s every weak spot, up to and including that having done so much work to set up these moral tales, the show tends to have little to say. Relationships are affirming, when all parties involved put in the work. It’s difficult not to see those we love. COVID-19 has made life really crazy; things are hard.
And yet the attempt is admirable. TV as a medium is agile enough to have produced a show that stands as a response to the events of this year, which is a start: The first draft of the prestige-streamer show about the COVID-19 era is now complete, and someone had to do it.
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