Vanessa's Weekly Rants pt. 1: COVID vs The Flash, Black Lightning, WandaVision, etc
It’s my first post in awhile and I’m going to kick it off with weekly rants! If you follow me on Twitter or on other social media platforms where I write and make other content (👀), you’ll know that I vent…a lot. And I always vent with good reason.
This week’s rant-worthy topic: COVID IS FUCKING UP MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SHOWS. CORONA IS TAKING A SHIT ON MY COMFORT FOOD.
No, seriously. This is a prevalent problem across the television landscape right now. Shows had to shut down and then re-start under extremely strict filming protocols. At the time when all of this was going down, my co-hosts on the Black Lightning Podcast and I speculated how this would affect shows.
Well, now we fucking know.
Let’s start with an early upset. Doom Patrol’s second season, while not as excellent as the first, was going full steam ahead with a really dope storyline when COVID shut down production unexpectedly, leading the second season to end abruptly on the penultimate episode. We never got a finale. What we got was a random cliffhanger and a cobbled-together ending. That was the least disappointing of the changes when I look back on it, but it was absolutely a harbinger of what was to come.
Doom Patrol season 3 is currently in production and it’s going to face the same problem The Flash is dealing with right now … tying up loose ends and storylines from the previous season. I trust the Doom Patrol writers’ room with dealing with this more so than The Flash’s, to be honest.
The next sign of the TV apocalypse was the bungled finale of WandaVision’s first season, another excellent show whose finale was mangled by COVID. I read that the post-production team was RUSHING to get everything done in time for the premiere because they got shut down by COVID. I didn’t think it would affect the show too much until I saw the finale.
The show spent careful time building up the Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis team-up only to see that collapse in the finale. Darcy appeared ONCE to run a dude over, like THAT’S how they end her big arc? I can’t even remember what Jimmy was doing in the episode, that’s how much of an impact he made and Monica? Well, other writers put it better than me. It definitely explains why we got 9 episodes instead of a standard 10-12 for these type of shows.
Ugh, and then we get to The CW. If you follow me on any platform or listen to my podcasts, you know I have a distinct disdain for The CW. The blatant anti-Blackness, sexism, homophobia and transphobia that has permeated the network has been called out by fans and actors on the network for years, but the CW never bothered to address it until summer of 2020. The summer everything was on fire because Black Americans are fed the fuck up with the state murdering us with no recourse.
I call it the summer of performative activism from brands and corporations and CW was no different. It was expected behavior, but what I did NOT expect was a slap in the face like them cancelling Black Lightning while it was filming its 4th season because China Anne McClain decided to leave the series. That’s not even the shittiest part … the worst part is that the cast and crew appeared to have found out THE SAME DAY as the rest of us. China ended up going on Instagram live and broke down. It was heartbreaking.
“We care about Black voices”, the CW lied, this past summer.
Adding insult to injury, while the network paid every actor to promote Superman & Lois and dropped their whole budget to advertise a critically panned show, they gave Black Lightning ZERO attention and won’t even give the show fucking video previews at the end of each episode LIKE EVERY OTHER GODDAMN SHOW ON THE NETWORK. Plenty of people have been noticing and complaining on Twitter.
The CW is anti-Black. That’s facts. The amount of times they’ve been called out by their own Black and brown actors is numerous. But COVID has affected Black Lightning as well, completely dismantling the family unit everyone watches the show for because they can’t all be in the same room all the time. It’s especially painful this season, being the last one, because this is all we’re going to get. What a terrible and insulting way to end a wonderful show, and one of the better ones on the network.
Finally, we get to The CW’s breadwinner: The Flash. This one, like a lot of the other CW shows, film in Vancouver. Canada has much tougher COVID restrictions and better leadership than the United States does and did. The Flash never got to finish its 6th season because it was shut down like everything else, so the final two episodes of season 6 got latched onto season 7. And that, it turns out, was a bad decision.
Because of the aforementioned “limited touching” restrictions, The Flash is also feeling strains from this but the writers are nowhere near as strong as Black Lightning or the other shows mentioned. They couldn’t figure out a more clever or interesting way to resolve threads from a previous season and decided to abuse their Black female lead on camera via her fucking husband. She refused to leave where she was and he pulled her out against her will (not physically, of course) and she started SEIZING on the FLOOR, with him staring at her aghast at what he’s done. COOL. More male angst at the expense of women being hurt and in this case, a Black woman.
This show has already relished in showing us Iris’ death over and over and over again (hi, season 3, you’re the fucking worst) and loves to create unnecessary marital tension between their flagship pairing. It’s disgusting misogynoir made worse by COVID’s restrictions.
I’m so absolutely fucking sick of all of this shit. I knew the coronavirus was going to impact everything but I had no idea it was going to serve us steaming shit on a plate. I would’ve rather all of these shows delayed until they could film normally. I know that seems more realistic now, with vaccines flowing more rapidly and things were more uncertain back then but DAMN. This is a nightmare and I fear it’s only going to get worse.
On the flip side, some shows are thriving despite COVID restrictions (shout out to all the Drag Race shows currently airing).