Wednesday, March 11, was a turning point, however, not just for the television industry, but for America at large. The NBA’s decision to suspend its season indefinitely—followed only minutes later by the announcement from Tom Hanks that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, were sick—came as a blaring wake-up call. In short order, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic, and the stock market fell precipitously. Finally, that same day, the CW teen drama Riverdale suspended production in Vancouver after discovering that someone on the show had been in contact with a COVID-positive person.
“As soon as that happened, everybody else felt safe to do it,” says one producer, “but you needed a first group to be the ones to step out.”
On Thursday March 12, as executives spent hours in meetings gaming out battle plans, the number of confirmed U.S. cases topped 1,300. Across the country, crews began rushing to complete the episodes they were working on.
“It’s especially difficult to shut down that close to the finish line, because you work yourself up into this kind of fever pitch at the end, where you’re trying to get everything,” says Hawley, the Fargo showrunner.
Not finishing likely meant that Fargo would not be able to air in time to be eligible for the Emmys. Hawley nevertheless called his executives at FX and MGM to tell them they needed to pull the plug and, between lunchtime and late Thursday afternoon, the mood had shifted to the point where no one argued: “Everyone understood it just wasn’t going to happen. We had to shut down.” The next day, Hawley learned that someone on their Los Angeles postproduction team was symptomatic, so those staffers were sent home to self-quarantine. “Suddenly I couldn’t even edit the show,” he recalls. “It is amazing how quickly we became paralyzed by events.”
A cascade of shutdowns followed. By Friday March 13—the day the U.S. declared a national emergency and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti announced the city’s schools would be closing down— American television had effectively come to a dead halt, hurling hundreds of thousands of people out of work.
“It all ramped up so fast,” says Rachel Shukert, a writer on the Netflix series GLOW. The week began with people avoiding “hugging or touching each other. By Friday, we were told we’re shutting down.”
Not everything went into hibernation. A few series, like The Crown, rushed to finish episodes in progress. Late night hosts quickly returned to the air, finding entertaining ways to shoot from home. And many writing staffs for scripted series transformed themselves into virtual writers rooms on Zoom.
The writers of Netflix’s animated series Big Mouth began congregating virtually that Friday. Cocreator Nick Kroll also recorded cast members’ voices from their homes. “Maya Rudolph is recording in her living room and so her kids are popping in and out of frame, which is so fun and sweet,” says Kroll. But since the show about the miseries of puberty occasionally gets graphic, he found himself having to warn his star, “We’re about to do a scene you may not want to have your children in the room for.”
The writers of The Walking Dead also quickly converted to working online. “It’s kind of ironic to be writing about the apocalypse in the middle of the apocalypse,” says writer LaToya Morgan. The team had spent an inordinate amount of time discussing survival tips without knowing one salient fact—“that we actually could potentially need them in our real lives.”
Meanwhile, companies struggled to figure out how to safely complete postproduction on shows that were nearly ready. Equipment for editing and sound mixing were delivered to some staffers’ homes before offices closed down and Los Angeles’ “shelter in place” order was issued. “We’re going to see how inventive everyone can be,” says Blumhouse copresident Marci Wiseman. “Most people want to be inventive because they want to work.”
Ironically, Hollywood executives had been anxiously anticipating a very different kind of apocalypse: the threat of a writers strike in May when an agreement between the studios and the writers guild expired. That’s one reason the new short-form streaming service Quibi had already squirreled away enough scripted content to last them until Thanksgiving. But the production shutdown still disrupted their unscripted “Daily Essentials” series, which meant shifting the set for music show Pop5 into host Tim Kash’s garage and the gaming show Speedrun into host Jimmy Mondal’s living room.