The Pandemic Was Terrible—But Did It Produce Some Actually Great Art?

There was a lot of art that came out during and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic that was…shall we say, best forgotten. But there was also a lot of art that met the moment, that made us feel something more acutely about the exceedingly strange moment we were living through or simply offered a balm in very troubling times. Five years after we learned what coronavirus even is, we are looking back at the cultural touchstones of that period—and those that will stand the test of time.

Bo Burnham: Inside

If we knew each other during the summer of 2021, you’ve heard this rant before: Bo Burnham: Inside is a masterpiece. This was my position without qualifiers. The 87-minute-long musical-comedy special wasn’t just “good for the pandemic”; it was a full-scale theatrical tour de force, directed, written, and performed by a single person within the confines of a tiny guest house in Los Angeles. Over 20 tracks Burnham (who was already a successful comedian and filmmaker prior to this Netflix special, though entirely unknown to me) captures the experience of living through the pandemic in a way that felt both blisteringly funny and devastatingly honest. He ricochets from describing the absurd mundanities of the moment (“FaceTime With My Mom (Tonight),” “White Women’s Instagram”) to visiting the darkest parts of his psyche (“All Time Low,” “Shit”).

The music is also just really good: The album, Inside (The Songs), charted all around the world. He was “Weird Al” Yankovic for the deeply online. Inside delighted me at a terrifying time—I have misty-colored memories of scream-singing during endless solo walks—but even five years later, I still find the whole thing pretty astonishing. —Jessie Heyman

Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration

Improbably—or not, given how nimble and ingenious theater people are—the pandemic yielded some truly wonderful dramatic experiments, from world-class performances filmed in empty studios and on vacant stages to productions created for Zoom or rejiggered for the radio. What was perhaps my very favorite, however, came close to being a total disaster. In April 2020, when giants of the musical theater world gathered to honor Stephen Sondheim’s birthday (he, the king giant, had turned 90 in March), the tribute was initially beset with technical difficulties: a long delay, issues with the sound, some troubling live feed of the stricken director. But when the show did finally get going, it was the best. Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, and Audra McDonald singing “The Ladies Who Lunch”! Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt doing “It Takes Two”! Aaron Tveit’s “Marry Me a Little”! Elizabeth Stanley’s gorgeous “The Miller’s Son”! Plus selections from Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, Raúl Esparza, Patti LuPone, Lea Salonga, and, and, and! (Devoid of their usual engagements, anyone who was anyone was very available to participate.) Yet the one I’d like to single out is Laura Benanti’s performance of “I Remember” from Evening Primrose, the hour-long musical set in a nightmarish department store that Sondheim and James Goldman created for ABC in the 1960s, with Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr as its stars. It’s a hauntingly beautiful number any day of the week, but at that very bewildering moment, when those of us trapped in the city were spending a lot of time staring at the walls, its opening lines—“I remember sky / It was blue as ink / Or at least I think / I remember sky”—made a lasting impression. —Marley Marius

Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now

I remember reading online that Charli XCX was planning to create a new album in six weeks as a pandemic project and thinking, Finally, something is happening! It felt like quarantine had lasted forever by that point. (It was, in fact, April 2020, and it had been two weeks.) Admittedly, I didn’t tune in to the Zoom calls she was hosting with fans and collaborators to refine what would eventually become How I’m Feeling Now, and it wasn’t until the album was released in full that I listened to it properly, but it hit me like an emotional sledgehammer from my very first listen. There were the songs that made me miss my friends: the blast of Sour Skittles pop on “Claws” and its fizzy overflows of affection (“I like, I like, I like everything about you”) or the thundering “Anthems” and its perfect summary of the latent urge to hit the town and get wrecked (“I want anthems / Late nights, my friends, New York”). There were the songs that reflected the inevitable fixation on past romantic relationships that plagued us singletons during the dark days of lockdown, like the criminally underrated “7 Years,” which still causes a speck of dust to get in my eye every time it comes on shuffle. And then there’s what is (in my humble opinion) her masterpiece, “Party 4 U,” so perfectly encapsulating the bittersweet mix of heartache and hedonism that makes Charli’s best music so powerful. (At the time I could have sworn she was singing it directly to—and about—me.) It was also the first time I felt like Charli’s magic as a musician came into focus across an entire, cohesive record, like she was offering us all another world to escape to—all of which is to say, without How I’m Feeling Now, it’s hard to imagine Brat. I remember going to see her perform the album at an intimate gig in London in November 2021—the energy in the room was electric as we all danced and jumped and chanted the lyrics we’d sung along to so many times in our bedrooms, but this time we were finally shoulder to shoulder with other people again. And it still holds up: To me How I’m Feeling Now isn’t just a great pandemic album, but an all-time great album, period. —Liam Hess

Grand Theft Hamlet

It’s January 2021, the UK has entered its third lockdown, and theaters remain closed. Two actors facing a dearth of work come up with the idea to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the most unlikely of places: the city of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto. That’s the premise of Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary from Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane filmed entirely within the infamous video game. We follow them assembling an extremely motley crew of actors—and a few ringers—and scouting locations, including an epic zeppelin that soars across the sky carrying the cast and audience. Notwithstanding setbacks both absurd (random gunfire) and real (the lead nabs an IRL acting gig and can’t make rehearsals), it becomes evident they might just pull it off.

Upon watching this film two months ago around its theatrical release, I immediately proclaimed it the best of the pandemic movies: madcap, zany, wildly fun, and surprisingly poignant, effectively capturing the what-the-hell spirit of the time. I thought about those many, many Saturdays spent playing boozy Jackbox Games offerings on Zoom with old buddies across the country. About how during that time you tried things you might not have otherwise: sourdough or roller-skating or banging a pan out your window at a specific time. How the result might be a sense of community or camaraderie or accomplishment or freedom or merely a moment of distraction, something to while away the hours. And any emotion was a reminder that you, we all, were human and still alive. And that amid all the death, life was still happening everywhere, all around us, even in—maybe especially in—places that weren’t real.

That’s how a video game rife with mindless violence provided a kind of refuge—and turned out to be an apt and very funny location for the senseless bloodshed of the Bard’s most famous of tragedies. Or as one of the actors screams when GTA police fire interrupts their filming of a recruitment video: “You can’t stop art, muthafuckers!” —Lisa Wong Macabasco

Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters

On April 17, 2020, a cascade of tinkling keys rippled through me, and like so many I was grateful. Fiona Apple gave us the gift of her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, just five weeks into the pandemic. Though the album was initially scheduled for a fall release, the artist decided to drop it early. Maybe the music could keep listeners company or, as she told Vulture, help “get out their feelings inside.”

Almost prophetically the album mirrored what we were experiencing in real time: interpersonal mayhem from being around one another 24/7 (“Drumset”), an anthemic banding together under crushing circumstances (“Heavy Balloon”), and the underlying sense of “Get me the hell out of here!” that snakes its way throughout the entire album (but especially so in the title track).

During those long, dark spring days, my pandemic besties’ text thread would alight with demands to take care of ourselves, inspired by the heroine who soothed our buzzed-out brains, “OKAY, FIONA ARMY! WE ARE GOING TO DO 20 PUSH-UPS TODAY!” I cooked more than I ever wanted to cook with her chanting in my ear, an ally in my resentment toward my newfound domesticity. A lifesaver when I was drowning in an endless sea of canned crushed tomatoes. And she sang to me as I careened through the sky with only a handful of other passengers on an eerily spacious commercial flight to reunite with my mother, who happened to be both gorgeous and terminally ill, for the first time in six months.

I gazed out at row after row of empty seats from behind my germ-repelling face shield, “’Cause you and I will be like a couple of cosmonauts / Except with way more gravity than when we started off,” Apple repeated. As always her words were stunningly prescient. —Joanna Solotaroff

Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure?

Sometimes an album comes along at the perfect moment. Released in June of 2020, Jessie Ware’s disco-inspired What’s Your Pleasure? was actually made over the two years preceding it, but it might as well have been dreamed up in the handful of months between the March shutdowns and the summer doldrums. “Tell me when I’ll get more / Than a dream of you,” she sings on the opening track, and wasn’t that what we all felt a few months in, with a vaccine a distant dream and the stark reality sinking in that this wasn’t going to be over any time soon? I was safe! I was lucky! And yet I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin, and here was an album dedicated to movement, magnetism, an itchy energy that had far too few outlets. It was a paean to touch, movement, and embrace, Ware has said—in short, that she was aiming to simply make people want to dance. I remember listening to it as I watched my kids run across the lawn at my parents’ house, fireflies spotting the darkening sky. We were so far from any urban dance floor, and yet we made our own disco. —Chloe Schama

Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore

Taylor Swift being cooped up in a cottage in the English countryside with her ex-boyfriend for two years may be one of the best things to happen to Swifties, as 2020 was the year we were graced with not one, but two incredible albums. As fans we’d never expected Swift to go back to her country roots after 1989, but that all changed with the release of Folklore. While the album isn’t necessarily a full-fledged country album, it gave a nostalgic taste for the early days of being a Swift fan with its singles: “Cardigan,” “Betty,” and “Exile.” Swift quickly doubled down on this era of her music, proving that the country genre is where her songwriting thrives by releasing Evermore just five months later. Without these two albums, and I guess…the pandemic, we may never have experienced the tectonic shift that happens when a room full of women collectively scream the lyrics to “August.” —Florence O’Connor and Irene Kim

The Late Late Show With James Corden

COVID office closures and new social distancing guidelines sent television production into a complete standstill. Late-night talk shows—including The Late Late Show With James Corden, where I was a staffer at the time—were some of the first programs to return to air in the early weeks of the pandemic. Creativity was on full display as an entirely new miniature set was constructed in Corden’s home garage, and four nights a week the show tried to provide an escape via Zoom interviews and comedy bits produced from afar. Phoning it in wasn’t an option; new formats were worked and reworked. It was all hands on deck to keep the joy at the heart of the show alive. The early pandemic episodes have a fever-dream quality, an exercise in keeping the staff employed almost as much as in providing comfort and a laugh to shell-shocked audiences. When it was eventually safe to return to the show’s permanent home at CBS Television City, the show was a looser, more laid-back version of itself. The monologue often became a back-and-forth between Corden and behind-the-camera staff. Everyone had spent enough time alone; taking each other’s company (and a live audience) for granted was no longer an option. —Phoebe Dishner

Station Eleven (2021)

I went back and forth as to whether Station Eleven technically counts as a work of pandemic art. It started filming in January 2020, just before the first lockdowns, and didn’t resume until a year later, the production having moved from Chicago to Canada. It was released in December 2021, around the time the omicron variant was spiking. And most peculiar of all, it was a show largely about a pandemic: Adapted from Emily St. John Mandel’s novel of the same name, it follows multiple characters living in a dystopian America two decades after a virus decimated the population, with tensions brewing between a troupe of traveling performers and a cult led by a mysterious figure known only as “the prophet.” You could blame the show’s premise for the fact it didn’t get anywhere near the attention deserved; who really wanted to watch a show about a devastating pandemic during a devastating pandemic? (Me, I guess.) Anyway, those who missed it truly missed out—without wanting to give too much away, I think Station Eleven is one of the most beautiful, affecting, and strangely uplifting TV shows I’ve ever seen—a genuinely impactful ode to the power of art, storytelling, and human connection that never felt saccharine or overworked. It’s never too late to watch it and give it the love it deserved back when it first came out. —Liam Hess