Social events were canceled everywhere except television.
Thebest TV showsthrow the best parties.
There is a narrative structure.
Colleen Hayes/NBC
Things get louder, things get quieter.
Night falls, maybe the sun rises.
There is climactic possibility, as subplots spread throughout a vast ensemble arrive at a single geographic space.
Colleen Hayes/NBC
Animosity fades in the spirit of revelry or boils over with liquid courage.
Your favorite characters dance together, or kill each other.Breaking Badstarts with a birthday.The Wireends with a wake.
And when was the last time you actually went to a party?
For us, it was a baby shower back in February, a few weeks after a 2-year-olds birthday.
Typical social schedule for parents: full weekend days, collapsed exhaustion around 8 p.m. That ended in March.
Zoom just isnt the same.
Social distancing isnt so social.
Some people partied like there was no pandemic.
(Some people were having fun at the Red Wedding, too.)
For most of us, this was the year of excessive digital interaction.
ThatspecialParks and Recreationepisodefrom April summed it up, didnt it?
The reunion unfroze them into our pandemic present.
Everyone else just had a camera and a screen staring back at them.
They were wonderful to see.
So the delirium was rapturous, breezy: An extremely nice orgy.
Colleen Hayes/NBC
The timing was auspicious, onscreen and off.
The season climaxes after the 2016 presidential election and aired its finale on Nov. 2, 2020.
A great party offers an escape from worry.
And escapism was already a mainstream existential mood, before COVID-19 made normality an escapist adventure.
The five-part series has been called a collection of five films hey, it’s fun to stretch definitions.
Bodies grind, beats bump, flirts are projected, eyes meet.
Nothing inLovers Rockis as expository as the sentence I just wrote.
It tells by showing.
It moves you by making you want to move.
And can we allow for a similar aesthetic possibility in the glittery gutter of reality television?
She convinced famously regal Tinsley Mortimer to join her for a skinny dip.
She angrily threw tiki torches across the back yard, nominally some kind of Charlottesville counter-protest.
She memorably screamed 1985 is gone!
Who knows what shes really like?
Old press clippings circulated with McSweeney saying lets-say-complicated-things about #MeToo and Donald Trump.
Case in point:Double Shot at Love, MTVs effusiveJersey Shorespin-off.
The ladies were mostly just stoked to hang out in a medium-sized Los Angeles mansion.
When youre a low-rent operation, why not move to a state without income tax?
Season 2 shed theBachelor-ish structure and imported the most funDouble Shotters to a Vegas penthouse.
Everyone pretended to work at a famous(?)
beach club while waiting for Pauly D to invite them to his DJ sets.
Pauly D rekindled his thing with Nikki Hall, and their relationship may outlast the coronavirus.
Vinny and Maria Elizondo finally hooked up; theyre soulmates, dont they realize it?
The CDC would recommend that citizens party smarter than the cast ofDouble Shot at Love.
The end of the pandemic should not be a license for unhealthy behavior and parties can turn sour quickly.
In its second season, DC UniversesHarley Quinnstaged a bachelorette bad-decision fiesta.
Worth pointing out, of course, that things werent great before everything got terrible.
Historians may look back on the years before 2020 as a party that finally had to stop.
The main characters receive a welcome gala tailored to their experiences.
Nobody there is having fun.
Immortal salvation has narcotized the best dead people into a joyless whiteout of the soul.
The puritanical tone was unexpected, and barely hidden by the shows Florida is crazy-level gags.
And then a day afterGood Placeended, Netflix released the final episodes ofBojack Horseman.
Mini-trend alert: another dour penultimate-episode afterlife party!
Nobody is having any fun.
There were times when I loved both sitcoms.
One year out, though, I find myself doubting the sweeping emotion of their final acts.
Everything will be okay is the hopeful message of too much entertainment today.
Everything is not okay is the brutal, and honest, corollary.
This is raw, visceral, somehow-still-funny storytelling, a high-wire act that braces you for everything to come.
Her best friend Terry (Weruche Opia) has a threesome.
There is a love connection with endearingly sober Biagio (Marouane Zotti) who happens to be a dealer.
But I wonder if theres something lightly meta in the wild night of Dont Forget the Sea.
The party ended long ago.
Everything from here is the hangover.
