Live Action Lead Time

I made this post on another thread a fortnight ago, but it only got two responses so I will attempt a dedicated thread instead.

Nine months into the pandemic (from a European perspective) it is becoming painfully clear which "new" content is actually new and which has been on a shelf for months or even years.

This point was hammered home by the Twitter reaction to the 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown 2020 Christmas Special which some of them are saying was actually shot in February 2019. In more normal years you might have gotten away with it fairly easily provided nobody on screen had a growth spurt/makeover/fatal accident before broadcast, but now it becomes rather jarring to watch supposedly up-to-date material in which people are gathered in dense crowds with no masks. Many comments have words to the effect of "It's like peering into an alternate universe!".

Apparently some broadcasters are even putting little "recorded before lockdown" disclaimers before an episode starts in order to pre-empt panicked viewer responses.

We have had the trope Animation Lead Time for as long as I can remember but there isn't an obvious equivalent for live action series. Dewey Defeats Truman doesn't quite apply because it's less a prediction than the absence of one. Unintentional Period Piece is meant to take a longer-term view, with a recommendation to wait at least ten years. Distanced from Current Events and Were Still Relevant Dammit both need the example to be a deliberate effort on the part of the production, which is not the case here. The Great Politics Mess Up has a similar effect, but this one I think goes much deeper as its the fine details of everyday life which are inescapably affected.

Note that while the Coronavirus pandemic is what sparked this thread, and is causing the most blatant examples, this can include any sufficiently disruptive occurrence between recording and broadcast that the series-makers did not anticipate. It should also be noted that explicit period pieces are exempt from this, as are those in a deliberately Ambiguous Time Period. This is for pieces that are supposed to look and feel contemporary, but clearly aren't.

Again, the obligatory XKCD link.

Edited by TommyR01D on Dec 30th 2020 at 9:47:03 AM

I once proposed a trope Instantly Dated that was something of a companion to Unintentional Period Piece (which is about a work that highly reflects the time period it was made, not just that it is obviously not made recently). The idea was that some event happens between when a work was made and when it was released that undermined itself, such as United Passions glorifying FIFA being released at the same time massive corruption and bribery was revealed at the executive level.

The COVID-19 quarantine is such a specific and all-encompassing event it's hard to really develop a trope to just that, broadly speaking it might be an inversion of Present-Day Past, that a work trying to come across as modern can't help but be a few months behind.

This might have legs, and I can think of one example right of the top of my head. Adam Sandler's first movie, Going Overboard features Manuel Noriega as the Big Bad... and came out after Noriega was overthrown in Operation Just Cause.

The "Instantly Dated" concept, or just anything similar about bad timing for the production, would help a lot of misused Hindsight examples that describe how close a certain show was to a related event, even if it's not necessarily Harsher in Hindsight because the event happened around the same time. (I.E. mentioning Gary Coleman in an episode released shortly after his death, which I saw in an Series/iCarly example).