Pandemic Nursing Home Drama 'Help' Arrives on Acorn TV in January

As we emotionally prepare ourselves to enter the third year of the coronavirus pandemic, maybe we shouldn't be surprised that the virus is now infiltrating our pop culture in more concrete ways than simply causing the shows we love to arrive on our screens months after they were originally scheduled to do so.

Some series have chosen to essentially ignore the pandemic entirely. (The most recent season of Succession, for example, never mentioned COVID, essentially assuming that their billionaire leading characters are so rich that even a global disease outbreak wouldn't touch the Roy clan.) Other shows have mentioned the pandemic in passing, but in a weird collective past tense kind of way, like it's something that's firmly behind us all. (Looking at you, And Just Like That.) Still others, like medical drama Grey's Anatomy, attempted to integrate the event into their storytelling in an organic way, with predictably mixed results.

Then, there's the real-life drama angle. Given the immediacy of, well, everything, these have been in relatively short supply thus far. (Probably not a bad thing, to be honest.) But Kenneth Branagh is set to play Prime Minister Boris Johnson in an upcoming dramatization of the U.K.'s COVID response. And Help, the critically acclaimed TV movie that tackles the dire and heartbreaking struggles of nursing home caregivers in the early days of the outbreak, aired on Channel 4 earlier this Fall and is set to stream on Acorn TV next month.