我不知道你,但是我只能勉强应付ving through this pandemic, much less wanting to be entertained by it.

But Hollywood is in a bind. With film and television productiongearing up again, producers and creators have to figure out how to tell stories against a backdrop that doesn’t resemble the one they left, while deciding whether it’s better to ignore a once-in-a-century virus that’s wiped out hundreds of thousands of lives—or shoehorn it into their dramas, comedies, reality shows and procedurals.

I, for one, don’t want to watch Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill duel motorboats or whatever over a cure to the novel coronavirus in a new “Mission Impossible” sequel, nor do I want to see the next bachelor chuck roses from 6 feet away. I don’t want “Grey’s Anatomy” to send guest star Alan Alda to an ICU that’s short one respirator.And I have zilcho interest in HBO’s experimental quarantine comedy,“Coastal Elites,”featuring a bunch of talented actors giving line readings via Zoom.

Apparently, I’m in the minority, since I’m not one of the masochists who made the middling Steven Soderbergh flick “Contagion”a huge on-demand hit.For the past six months, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid content about our terrible outbreak— shunning cable news, videoconferenced talk shows, even pandemic telethons featuring all those pop stars whose songs I have onlyheard insidenow-shuttered Starbucks and gyms.

Instead, through the unrelenting weeks of mounting deaths and layoffs, I’ve gone backward into the content catalog to read and stream stuff about a time we’re no longer in and places we can no longer go to.

Dashiell Hammett’s “The Thin Man,” a pithy mystery novel about a rich alcoholic who reluctantly investigates an acquaintance’s disappearance between hangovers, made me feel better about my increased alcohol consumption and lack of productivity during quarantine.

Josephine Tey’s book “The Daughter of Time,” about a bedbound British detective who obsesses over his country’s apocryphal treatment of Richard III, assured me that it’s natural to fixate on irrelevant mysteries when your daily reality is so depressing.

That classic sitcom “Cheers,” about an amiable group of barflies and their genial (well, except for Carla) beer dealers, became a stand-in for my neighborhood saloon, which I haven’t visited since Valentine’s Day and where a young stranger once proudly displayed stab wounds so fresh I thought cheap vodka might squirt out of them.

So, too, did the Hulu-streaming “Party Down,” Peacock-revived “A.P. Bio” and podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” become my surrogate workplaces, populated by smart misfits and sweet dweebs who annoy you into loving them.

And while I may have carved space for a thrilling and social-justice-minded playoff race inside the NBA bubble, I’m not so sure Hollywood should even try to dramatize our collective gap year.

America recently marked the 19th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Like Pearl Harbor, the fall of the World Trade Center scarred the national consciousness. Like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 is something we largely avoided revisiting in entertainment, with a few notable exceptions.

Paul Greengrass’ “United 93” was well reviewed but hardly seen when it was released in 2006, and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” from the same year quickly faded. The infamously awfulDecember 2001 issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man,”which depicted Marvel superheroes and villains putting aside their differences to clean up ground zero, became a collector’s curio for making villainous dictator Doctor Doom cry.

More lasting art would come from the aftermath of 9/11 than the ambush that chiseled the date into our national lexicon.

“The 25th Hour” (2002) and “Gangs of New York” (2003) channeled our victims’ rage to interrogate the myths of our past and present. “Jarhead” (2005) and “Generation: Kill” (2008) dealt with the pent-up male aggression that Uncle Sam exploited during the first and second Iraq wars. “Children of Men” (2006) and “The Dark Knight” (2008) imagined what society becomes when it loses faith in its higher ideals. “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” deconstructed our slow descent from moral superiority to moral relativism to moral rot with scathing rationalism.

Then again, you can’t really compare what 9/11 “inspired” to what the pandemic may squeeze out today. First of all, 9/11 was a blast of violence that shocked us into a decade-long fugue state. Two wars that we shamefully kept atarm’s length. The surrendering of personal liberties and origin of immigration police that we shrugged off. The premeditated torture that we implicitly sanctioned. The first responders we thanked and then deprived of health care.

Even though we’re still in pandemic utero, everything feels immediate, right in front of our noses, right outside our windows, right on top of our streets. This wildfire plague, these unrepentant cops, this cliff-diving economy, this rioting climate, this imploding White House.

I see plenty of people confronting the now on their own terms. I’m not sure they’re waiting for the entertainment industry to reflect it back to them.

I’m also skeptical about what Hollywood can tell us about wearing pajama bottoms to our closet offices, hate-watching our phones and giving ourselves bangs that TikTok users haven’t already.

Luckily, I don’t have to make that choice. It isn’t as if there’s a shortage of pre-pandemic content to sift through. My latest obsession?“Last Chance U,”Netflix’s absorbing, often moving docuseries about fallen college football athletes striving to get back to Division I schools.

Maybe 25, 50 or 100 years from now, when the Earth is a molten rock surrounded by bubbling waters and populated by a few dozen lizard-skinned scavengers in gas masks, they’ll break into the ruins of the National Museum of American History and find an episode of “The Conners,” where Dan and Jackie debated whether to wear face coverings to Walmart. Maybe they’ll laugh and reminisce about a time when things weren’t so bad.

我,我回去看“干杯”,傻瓜g myself that I’ll be able to visit the real thing soon enough. I’ll save you a barstool.