The sadness in Netflix's Social Distance is a relief

Vulture

"It was just such a comfort to watch something about this year that felt truly sad," Kathryn VanArendonk says of Netflix's eight-episode quarantine anthology series created by Jenji Kohan and Hilary Weisman Graham.  "Social Distance doesn’t offer any answers about this moment, but in lieu of answers, I’ve realized that I will happily accept some honesty." Social Distance, she says, is in contrast to other quarantine shows. HBO Max's Coastal Elites and Freeform's Love in the Time of Corona have "tried to soften the razor edges of this crisis by translating them into fiction," she says. "Coastal Elites performed this by simply ignoring what this year has been like for any Americans without access to health care, money, and cultural privilege. For Love in the Time of Corona, it was the lie of the happy ending, one that displaced all our anxiety about death and destruction onto a minor older character who was already in a nursing home (functionally dead already, in this fiction) and then letting everyone else experience quarantine as a time of personal growth."

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• Taking place amid the uncertainty of April and May of this year, Social Distance hits too close to home
• Like pretty much all COVID-centric series thus far, Social Distance suggests that we’re still too close to the pandemic to say anything meaningful about it
• Social Distance will move even cynical survivors of lockdowns
• Social Distance uses quarantine as a creative spur, stitching together a new kind of storytelling via Zoom, TikToks, Grindr and other forms of connectivity
• Social Distance scrapped its original finale in response to George Floyd's death
• Danielle Brooks found Social Distance appealing because she could learning about lighting, production and sound while working with her mom