How Upfronts 2022 Was a Covid Superspreader Event

Late at night, the nets bring the hosts to their previous performances for comic relief. But it turned out to be half-joking when Seth Myers told the thousands of people gathered at Radio City Music Hall for his NBCUniversal performance, “What a historic hall to be able to tell people you’ve hit Covid.”

Ten days later, Covid incidents reached the ranks of those who participated in last week’s New York City Marathon. Nearly all senior network and studio executives were affected, along with support staff working at the shows, as well as media buyers and reporters attending the event line-up.

The topic is unavoidable in every conversation this week, which includes everyone featured at the top of the TV industry in what is probably the biggest Covid outbreak since the pandemic began. .

Given the unfortunate combination of the New York holidays and the not-so-strict Covid protocols as businesses across the country lift restrictions, it’s no surprise that the initial personal response will become a super delivery event in three years’ time. . Most of the attendees were not wearing masks, and we understand that some executives undergo daily testing as part of their company guidelines, but none of the infertile guests were required to be tested for Covid all week. (Vax cards were mandatory everywhere).

On Monday, the first day of progress, New York health officials strongly recommended that people wear masks in densely populated indoor areas. But they didn’t go as far as they should, and not many masks were seen at ad buyer events for the next two days.

It was a prelude to NBCUniversal’s take on the case with sophisticated producer tricks featuring dozens of artists at Radio City Music Hall, and they were mostly unmasked cases, as was Disney’s Basketball City event on Fox (mostly pre-recorded) on Monday’s Skylight. On Tuesday, most attendees lined up behind a grandstand, behind CEOs and big advertisers sitting in seats and tables near the front.

Warner Bros. Discovery held the event Wednesday morning at the Madison Square Garden Theatre, but on the day Paramount Global hosted Carnegie Hall, attendees forced those who could enter to wear masks and were then reminded. Keep masks on throughout the event.

The CW also required attendees to wear masks while in downtown New York.

And then there were the parties. It came in a variety of sizes, from the relatively small CW and Foxes to the mid-size NBCUniversal and Disney, and ended with Paramount, which housed hundreds of evangelists on nine floors of the former Barn’s New York building. Due to the nature of social gatherings with food and drink, the bastards were almost unmasked.

It is said that positive Kovid tests may be overlooked by some servers that should be announced in advance, but it is difficult to say anything because it has not been announced in advance. The only proven case was ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who had to do his nearly annual roast before it was delivered to the theatre.

While the scale of the prominent Covid’s spread didn’t become clear until this week, there was a general sense of inevitability among attendees who agreed last week that there was a high probability of contracting COVID as New York approached. Orange Hill. . . Warning. As one industry player at the time told Deadline, there’s a “risk of doing business” these days.