I was watching an old episode of Magnum P.I from the 1980s the other night. Thomas Magnum had ended up in hospital (as he often did). The doctor came to Magnum’s bedside to talk to him. Said doctor had a cigarette dangling from his lip and as he spoke, clouds of smoke billowed around him. The patient in the bed beside Thomas Magnum was also smoking. This clearly cements the show as a product of its time. You would never see that today. If you do see someone smoking, it is usually a baddie.
I also recently watched someone on social media brag about meeting Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain circa 1990. This (probably very young) person apparently went outside to have a cigarette at the same time Cobain also went out for a smoke break. Commenters in the thread immediately called the person out as a liar, purely because there was no such thing as having to go outside if you wanted to smoke in 1990. You just smoked wherever you were. I remember in the 1980s when I worked in a student bar and someone came up to ask for an ashtray. My boss said ‘you’re standing in it’
Similarly, I watched an episode of NCIS New Orleans which not only starred the Covid-19 pandemic, but featured – across many episodes – characters wearing masks.
The first thing I realised was how much I relied on looking at facial expressions and mouths moving. The makers of the series had overdubbed the sound so there was no mask-muffle but it was very distracting. I wonder if this is because Sweden never had a mask mandate so I was never used to listening to and looking at people in masks? I have worn one myself on public transport, in airports, on airplanes, and in Spain. But watching it on television really bothered me. Sweden does not dub any foreign-language television shows or movies into Swedish. They are left in the original language and have Swedish subtitles. This makes it easier to understand the dialogue despite the masks, but I really missed the facial expressions as social cues.
Several television series I have watched lately – Greys Anatomy and the Good Doctor – wove the pandemic into storylines so that mask-wearing was not surprising. But for other series that chose to film during the pandemic, there was no storyline connection to the masking. The characters were just masked. I wonder if parents in future will have to explain that to their children?
I wonder if Covid-19 will feel really long-ago and strange? It already does. I hope that continues because I, for one, would not like global pandemics to become par for the course.