The march of an unprecedented international crisis, the invisible threat of COVID-19, has caused an unspeakable number of deaths and a worldwide economic cratering. It has also landed all but the most essential workers on their couches, fighting a war with life-and-death stakes alone in sweats as Netflix’s Tiger King streams.

Yet many people can also work from home—television writers and producers among them. And as the few TV professionals who can produce future content right now in the form of scripts, they’re the first ones to grapple with how to tell stories in a post-virus world. Once they return, will their TV shows build entire narratives around the global pandemic—or simply throw in a cursory toilet-paper-versus-bidet reference?

“I love serial killers,” said one producer, who has made hit network shows about those killers and the cops who stop them. “I don’t want to do that now.” She’s using her time at home to retool a project that would hit screens after the virus is contained, predicting there will be “no cynicism after this, no room for mean.” Instead she envisages “blue sky” programming that will reflect stronger personal bonds. If families can make it through 24/7 togetherness, they sure as hell can make it through a traditional A-story plotline.

Writer and producer Simran Baidwan (Manifest, The Good Doctor, Chicago Med), who usually “lives for intense drama”—last year she cowrote one episode of the aptly titled Good Doctor two-parter “Quarantine,” about a mysterious respiratory virus—is similarly anticipating a different sort of national mood. Baidwan thinks that the virus will undoubtedly touch every American, either directly or indirectly. Creators will respond to it by “us[ing] their art to inform and elevate, to show humanity is more alike than different,” she told me from her L.A. home, where she is “bathing” herself in Schitt’s Creek and The Great British Baking Show. The content that follows the crisis, she continued, will reflect “that ordinary people are elevated during extraordinary times. We’ll see threads of those kinds of storytelling.”

She emphasized, though, that her predictions are all guesswork; after all, nobody knows how many weeks or months TV creators will have to thoughtfully reflect on the pandemic. “We may be off the air for a very long time,” Baidwan said.

It’s true; unlike a series with a third-act twist you can see coming, the denouement of our current safer-at-home existence seems a long way off. That leaves the start date for a new TV season a hazy question mark on the 2020 calendar. Shows and pilots that were in the middle of shooting were shut down in mid-March. Social distancing rules may mean that months pass before they start up again—before hundreds of cast and crew members can work together in tight quarters once more. “When it’s safe enough to go back to shooting, the pandemic will be a memory—and maybe people won’t want to talk about it,” one producer told me.

Trauma may not be the only element holding back television series from addressing the coronavirus. TV has a way of rooting shows in an off-kilter reality; we accept alternate presidents, and no mention of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina even on series that ostensibly take place in a world recognizably like the real one. Generally speaking, TV executives also like their programs to be somewhat evergreen; network TV aims to have a timeless feel, so that it might appeal to as broad an audience as possible. “Rooting a show in the 2020 pandemic will essentially make it a period piece,” one insider explained to me.