One of the untold casualties of the coronavirus: the webseries that Wired was planning on making out of the weekly While You Were Offline column I write for the site. I’m not sure if it’s totally dead or just sleeping due to circumstances, but I do know that the week everyone at Condé Nast started working from home was, ironically, going to be the week the series launched. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying.
I had this strange relationship with the webseries — on the one hand, I wasn’t really involved in developing or making it beyond talking to the producers early on in the process, so I was pretty much on the outside. But I also was on the inside; each episode was to be built around the column I had written for that week, meaning that I was responsible to some degree for each week’s video. I was in two places at once.
The development process took months; the first I heard about it was in the second half of last year, and what seemed tentative and slightly stuttering in terms of progress soon became much more constant. There was a pilot made — I never saw it, which I’m at once relieved about because I know I would have broken everything down and been highly critical of my role as minimal as it was, but at the same time, I do kind of wonder what it was like — and then, I believe, a series of weekly dry run episodes as a proof of concept that the production and turnaround time was possible on a weekly, ongoing basis.
For my part, I just kept doing what I do with the column with the one change being that I filed it a day earlier each week in order to let the video team do their thing. It was something that I struggled with at first, because it shortened the time I had to get the column done and made it less timely when it ran, but I soon settled into the new rhythm of things.
And now, to the best of my knowledge, it’s all off. It was an odd experience, the feeling of expectation and excitement and uncertainty, of weird responsibility, almost, but not a bad experience. We’ll see what happens when the post-virus world starts to assert itself.