Covid-19 in Film and Television: Watching the Pandemic

This collection explores the impact of Covid-19 on the production and consumption of television and film content in the English-speaking world. Offering in-depth analysis of select on-screen entertainment, the volume addresses entertainment’s changing role during and following the Covid-19 pandemic. It also studies the pandemic’s incorporation into the narrative of numerous series, films, and other televised formats, capturing the moments and contexts in which these developments emerged. Chapters examine the pandemic’s impact both on a micro- and macro level, focusing on the content as well as form of TV shows and films. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the book offers a range of perspectives, exploring phenomena such as the ’YouTubification’ of audience-reliant late-night television, as well as films and TV shows such as Superstore, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Good Fight.

Given the pandemic’s lasting impact on the film and television industries, this book will be a valuable read for scholars studying audience and viewer reception of on-screen content, and the impact of crises on cultural industries. It will also appeal to researchers in cultural studies, popular culture studies, television studies, internet studies, film studies, and media studies more broadly.

Verena Bernardi is a senior lecturer and academic administrator in the English Department at Saarland University, Germany. Her research interests include vampire studies, cultural studies (North America and Scotland), television studies and fandom studies. She is the author of Us versus Them, or We? Post-2000 Vampiric Reflections of Family, Home and Hospitality in True Blood and The Originals. Among others, she has published in Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture (2017) and is a coeditor of All Around Monstrous (2019).

Amanda D. Giammanco is co-founder of and coordinator for Saarland University’s English Writing Center. She is also a PhD student working on American national identity formation and television in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Her research interests include post-war suburbanization, critical whiteness studies, critical race studies, American cultural history, media studies, as well as rhetoric and narratology.

Heike Mißler is a senior lecturer in British Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University. Her research interests include gender and queer theory, feminist theory, critical race studies, critical whiteness studies, popular romance studies, TV and film studies, and posthumanism. She is the author of The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation (2017).