Writing in April 2020, Joke Hermes and Annette Hill note that audiences turned to television during the coronavirus pandemic “because of its particular affordances: its affective, material and ontological elements which become central in lockdown Culture” (2020: 656). There are clear links between the pandemic experience, media texts, and our sense of what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ontological security (Giddens 1991), which “arises out