This was the year when everything became TV

The year is coming to a close, which means it’s time for critics like me to look back on the most memorable television of 2020. There was “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Coel’s tour de force on HBO. There was “Palm Springs” (on Hulu) and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” (on Amazon Prime) and that instant-classic TV-antihero drama, “Hamilton” (on Disney+). And then there were the offbeat streaming hits, like “Your Weekly Office Departmental Planning Meeting” and “Your Sophomore Year in College” and “Thanksgiving Dinner With Your Mom.”

If you didn’t think of many of those things as TV, 2020 argued otherwise. When the pandemic hit, an immediate question was how long, given COVID-19 production restrictions, we would have new TV to watch. But the bigger change was quite the opposite. In 2020, it turned out, nearly everything became TV.

As a pandemic constrained our boundaries to the four walls of our houses and the four corners of our devices, screens became our main conduits to let the outside in. Movies became TV, like “Mulan,” originally meant to show in theatres, and “Wonder Woman 1984,” which will be released simultaneously in theatres and on HBO Max. Theatre became TV — the film versions of big shows like “David Byrne’s American Utopia” and an array of stage plays reconceived as virtual events.

With gyms closed, mornings began with a YouTube yoga video, or, if you splurged, some quality time with a Peloton display. Daytime, if you had a job that could be done remotely and were fortunate enough to keep it, you logged on to work. Evening fell, and as my colleague Tim Herrera put it — time to switch to the party laptop!

All of this further bonded us to TV and blurred the definition of the genre. To some extent, the pandemic accelerated changes that were already underway, be it the separation of movies from cinemas or the shift of recreational time to mobile devices. (We all drew the line at Quibi, though.)

This wasn’t limited to entertainment. Thanks to FaceTime and texting and virtual spaces, our social lives were already growing more digital and mediated. I remember speaking on a panel at the Park Slope Food Co-op in late February (on the shopping floor, the panic-buying of beans and rice was just beginning), and the moderator worrying aloud about how much time young people today socialised on screen, instead of having “real” physical interactions.

Circumstances would soon teach us what the kids already knew — that those interactions were as real as anything that takes place between people. They were certainly real for isolated COVID patients and their families, separated by a disease that made breathing the same air dangerous, for whom screens were the only way to communicate and, sometimes, to say goodbye.

It’s different, though, when every contact is contextualised through a screen. Suddenly, cousin Emily in Pittsburgh exists for you on the same plane as “Emily in Paris.” You might have these experiences though a tablet or a laptop or what our long-ago ancestors called a “TV set,” but in the literal sense it’s all “television” — seeing from a distance.

Visiting family or conferring with co-workers over a video connection isn’t a bad thing; imagine getting through all of this 20 years ago or more, reliant on dial-up modems or just the phone. But the presence of a person on videochat is necessarily different, more like the presence of a TV character.

In a workplace, other people are there in an ambient way — they drift in, they drift out, there’s an occasional did-you-see-this exchange between tasks. The TV of People doesn’t work that way: Your switch is either on or off. People become episodic. Someone is present until their little rectangle winks off and they disappear. Show’s over.

What distinguished TV, when it entered people’s homes in the middle of the 20th century, was that it created a second world in your living room, one that contained all of the greater world within it: baseball stadiums, theatre stages, the African savanna. It’s hard to see it this way several decades of commercials and game shows later, but it really was a kind of magic.

When that secondary world by necessity becomes the primary one, as it did for so many of our waking hours this year, that relationship changes. Suddenly, we’re spending much, or most, of our time somewhere other than where our bodies are.

After enough time in virtual classrooms and online staff meetings, watching a TV drama is less an escape, exactly, than a change of scenery, one visual overlay replaced with another. (How many people, starting this spring, spent a day in “the office,” then closed that tab, opened another, and spent the evening in “The Office”?)

As a TV critic, I used to be the only one in the family who spent the day working at home, glued to screens. Now the whole household — two telecommuters, one distance-learning high school student and another home from college — is together-apart, jacked into four separate Matrixes.

At the end of the day, if everyone’s free, we binge a show. (We finished “Dark” and “Game of Thrones” and just started on “Mad Men.”) It’s fun, because watching a great TV show is fun, but also for the experience of making comments and dissecting an episode when it’s done. Being four people in a living room together, in this year, is as much an escape as visiting Westeros.

Of course, 2020 wasn’t all Zoom conferences and binge-watches. It was the same year that people left their homes, in cities and towns across the country, to protest racial injustice. But this movement also happened in screen space and physical space at once.

It was a smartphone video, remember, that captured the moments leading up to George Floyd’s death, sparking a mass movement. And when that movement hit the streets, protesters used hand-held video to capture other instances of police violence.

It was more evidence that screens are not just a passive means of engaging with the world. They can be as active as you want them to — whether that involves streaming a protest, entertaining one another on TikTok or lip-syncing the president. Life became TV this year, but let’s not say that like it’s the worst thing. TV, 2020 reminded us, is also a place where life happens.

© 2020 The New York Times Company