How COVID Changed TV Production Forever

Yahoo

12-03-2025

Five years ago this week, the television industry rose to the challenge of keeping news, daytime and late-night talk shows and other topical series on the air during the harsh early months of the COVID pandemic.
We didn't know it then, but March 2020 marked a huge inflection point for the television business. Stay-at-home orders, masks and antigen tests — it seems distant and not so distant all at once. The story of how COVID helped supercharge the streaming business — and the streaming wars — has been well documented in recent years.
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But another big TV story unfolded during the early months of lockdown that hasn't gotten as much attention. The first few weeks of the pandemic spurred more seat-of-the-pants innovation to broadcast operations and engineering than had been done since the days of Sid Caesar and Milton Berle in the early 1950s. In media and entertainment, the show-must-go-on ethos is real. The last thing TV pros wanted to do was serve America dead air. Times were hard enough. By the end of 2020, the death toll from COVID in the U.S. alone had reached a staggering 400,000.
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The social distancing conditions imposed forced producers and crew members and technicans to create virtual control rooms on the fly. They had to figure out how to re-create networks for communications and video collaboration tools in a matter of days. They ordered a whole lot of digital video equipment from Amazon to assemble home bureaus in a box for anchors. Talk shows quickly moved to stack up monitors to create virtual studio audiences.
I've wanted to tackle the story of the great scramble of the early COVID months for several years. I had the privilege of as Colbert returned to filming shows with live audiences at the Ed Sullivan Theater. In those interviews it became apparent how much derring-do and experimentation had been going on behind the scenes at a time when production staff was spread far and wide.
I knew there were great stories there, but I didn't know how good they were until I started interviewing the 10 sources that you'll hear in this episode. They shared stories that captured this fraught period with moments of humor, moments of meltdowns involving both tech and tykes, and some moments of heartbreak. And in the end, what changes really mattered? What innovations stuck around beyond the crisis? We examine the lasting legacy of pandemic-era workarounds.
My guests are:
Linsey Davis – anchor of ABC News Live 'Prime' and 'World News Tonight' Sunday
Vin Di Bona – executive producer of 'America's Funniest Home Videos'
Chris Dinan – executive producer of ABC News' 'World News Tonight'
Tony Dokoupil – anchor of 'CBS Mornings'
Bill Hemmer – co-anchor of Fox News' 'America's Newsroom'
Jason Kurtz – executive producer and showrunner of 'The Drew Barrymore Show'
Simone Swink – executive producer of 'Good Morning America'
Shawna Thomas – executive producer of 'CBS Mornings'
Jon Tower – senior broadcast producer of 'CBS Mornings'
Scott Wilder – executive VP of of production and operations for Fox News Media
Highlights from the episode:
Davis: 'I remember the night that it really became real for us, and the NBA canceled a game, and it was just a moment unlike anything I've ever … I've been reporting for about 25 years, and I just remember texting friends of mine about and they were like, 'Wait, no, that can't be happening…''
Wilder: 'It was like zone defense. We were just trying to get people [equipment] and we tried to look where people live. I have a news photographer who lives in New Jersey and an anchor who lives in New Jersey. Marry that team up together. I have a news photographer who lives on Long Island and anchor who lives on Long Island. So, that's a team. Westchester, Connecticut, and so on and so forth. And that's how we started.'
Dokoupil: 'I tried to convince myself I was like Gay Talese — who I'd interviewed before — and who used to put a suit on to walk from the top floor of his brownstone down to the basement to go to work as a writer. And that was kind of like what I did. I got up, I put a suit on, and I walked from the living room down one floor to the basement and and tried to be a professional. But it was a very unfinished basement with water bugs, let's call them — we won't say cockroaches — crawling up out of the drain on a nightly basis.'
Tower: 'Over the course of 15 hours, they had to set up an entire workable control room and show for the next day. And under normal conditions, you would maybe give a team like that a week, maybe two, to do that. And they had literally the night.'
Thomas: 'New York City was a ghost town. It felt like one of those movies where you wake up and you're wandering through the streets, and a place that's normally bustling is is absolutely lifeless. And it was actually exactly like that.'
Dinan: 'It was interesting how quickly people adapted. They just found ways to work around issues and work around problems and make something happen. I look back at that time as a very innovative time for an industry that had never operated like that. Nobody generationally had experienced anything like this. So it was completely new.'
Kurtz: 'There were conversations [about postponing the launch of 'The Drew Barrymore Show'], but they were shut down very quickly. We all just collectively — the executives at CBS, myself, Drew and all the wonderful people that work here — it was just this collective feeling of we're doing this and we're focused, and maybe the world needs this bright spot right now, and hopefully we can be that. And that was sort of just collectively how we all felt. It was never really said out loud. It was never this big rah-rah mission. It just was this undertone and feeling we all had together that was — we're doing this, and we'll see everyone in September.'
Swink: 'We filmed Katy Perry in her backyard singing her brand new song 'Daisies.' And I would argue it was in many ways very cool that we had been forced to innovate into that because we were seeing a very famous pop star bring us a new song in a different kind of environment. It wasn't the usual slick stage production. So in some cases the innovations forced some great television.'
Di Bona: 'The poignant piece of it is that we kept people working and it was a very, very difficult time. But we had work and, hopefully, we kept America laughing. And you know, that's our job.'
(Pictured: Top row — Vin Di Bona, Tony Dokoupil, Simone Swink, Shawna Thomas and Scott Wilder. Bottom row — Jon Tower, Jason Kurtz, Bill Hemmer, Chris Dinan and Linsey Davis)
'Strictly Business' is Variety's weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.
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