As Americans of every kind began contemplating the ever-increasing prospect of contagion and a quarantine with no clear end, the television industry scrambled to figure out how it could keep turning out entertainment for a world voracious for distraction. There was no road map for how to proceed, and what executive wanted to be the first to make such a drastic move? So production chugged on. Series and pilots continued to shoot around the country. As late as Thursday March 5—the day after governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California—HBO held a lavish Hollywood premiere for the third season of Westworld, where attendees gamely fist-bumped instead of hugging.

“Look, it’s not real till it’s real,” says veteran film and TV producer Christine Vachon, who was filming Halston, Ryan Murphy’s forthcoming Netflix series starring Ewan McGregor, when COVID-19 came to town. “So you have hand sanitizer around, and you wrap your craft service snacks in plastic and all of those things. It was the feeling of, ‘Okay, we can still shoot the show. Nobody’s telling us we can’t, so we’ll do everything to make people as safe as possible.’”

The industry had dealt with forces beyond their control before, of course. Julie Plec, mastermind of the CW series The Vampire Diaries and Legacies and cowriter of the forthcoming Netflix political drama The Girls on the Bus, says she initially assumed that working around COVID-19 would be like making contingency plans for snow storms. “That’s happened to us several times over the last decade, where you are looking at the weather, trying to decide if the snow’s going to hit and when it’s going to start,” she says. “The anxiety level of the crew can get to a point where, even if it hasn’t snowed yet, we send them home because it’s not worth the risk.”

"We were in constant huddles, and with each new piece of information came another decision about how to act. At every turn, this kept getting more dire”—copresident of Blumhouse television Jeremy Gold.

In Chicago, showrunner Noah Hawley was deep in the fourth season of FX’s Fargo, with Chris Rock. Hawley had arrived on set on March 9 to direct an episode, only to discover that a crew member of the upcoming Fox show NeXt had tested positive. Some members of that crew had since joined Fargo. “We sent everybody home who had worked on that show, first thing,” says Hawley, “and then there was the scramble for information: Who was it? Were other people feeling sick?”

After talking to executives, he gathered the team to tell them what he knew. “Everyone was really unsettled by the news,” Hawley says. “We had a prop master whose girlfriend had worked on that other show, and we ended up sending him home just to be safe. But it did raise a lot of questions that were hard to answer, like: What’s the level of exposure at which the risk is deemed too great?”

Gloria Calderón Kellett had begun doing risk analysis for her Pop TV series, One Day at a Time, even before March 9. One of the show’s stars, Rita Moreno, is 88 years old and in late February, as they prepared for the season premiere, Calderón Kellett began to worry that the actress would be in peril if she traveled to New York for a talk show. “I went to her dressing room and I said, ‘Hey listen, I know these are huge opportunities for the show, but don’t be a hero.’”

One Day at a Time began limiting the number of people allowed on set. On March 3 and March 10, they filmed without the usual live studio audience, a disquieting experience for an ensemble accustomed to the real-time feedback. “Is this funny?” star Justina Machado asked the few crew members present. To which, the crew yelled back, “Yes, you’re hilarious! We’ll try to laugh louder.”

Intensifying matters, broadcast networks were in the midst of pilot season, producing the first episodes of potential new shows. On Wednesday, March 11—the day the White House announced it would bar travelers from most European countries—CBS’s creative chief David Nevins showed up for a live taping of B Positive from sitcom king Chuck Lorre and his Mom collaborator, Marco Pennette. The show revolves around a classic odd-couple premise, in which a man in need of a kidney (Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) forges a bond with a potential donor (Annaleigh Ashford from Masters of Sex). Nevins was elated to be working with Lorre, but a stark thought occurred to him: “This may be the last audience show anywhere in America—and maybe the world—for a really long time.”