Finding Order in Chaos: What Foyle’s War Taught Me About Living Through the Pandemic

At the beginning of the pandemic, I found myself gravitating toward old British detective shows. I didn’t plan it. I simply reached for them the way some people reached for sourdough starters, French lessons, or long-postponed reading lists. They felt like projects — achievable, finite, soothingly structured.

But they also became something else: a lullaby for adulthood. In these shows, no matter how tangled the crime, justice arrived within ninety minutes. Order was restored. People went back to their tea, their gardens, their ordinary routines. In a world suddenly defined by uncertainty, that kind of narrative reassurance felt almost medicinal.

Then I discovered Foyle’s War.

Set in a coastal English town during World War II, the series follows Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, a widower whose moral clarity is matched only by his understatement. With Sergeant Paul Milner and his driver, Samantha Stewart, he investigates crimes that unfold against air-raid sirens, rationing lines, and the constant dread of invasion.

The plots pull from the anxieties of wartime Britain: a German woman murdered after being spared internment, priceless art stolen under the guise of wartime protection, a pro-Nazi meeting interrupted by an inexplicable death. The war is never just scenery; it seeps into every household and decision, fraying tempers and testing loyalties.

The toll is personal, too. Milner has returned from Norway missing part of his leg. Foyle’s son risks his life in the skies. Sam loses her boarding house to a bomb. As the seasons progress, pleasures shrink — a toy for a child or a spoonful of sugar becomes the stuff of pub stories.

And still, life goes on. People fall in love, quarrel, make do, and wait.

That quiet waiting, I realized, felt familiar.

For the last several years, most of us have lived a version of the world Foyle’s War depicts — not warriors on the front lines, but civilians adjusting to constraints we didn’t choose. Our decisive battles happened elsewhere: in ICUs, research labs, and public-health offices. We measured time not by victory parades but by infection charts and shifting rules. We told ourselves the end was coming “in a few more weeks,” then again, and again.

One moment in the show lingers with me. At the end of season four, church bells ring for the first time in three years — their silence had been a warning system for invasion. “The war is just about over,” someone says. It is December 1942. There are still years to endure.

That line echoed our own false dawns.

History often compresses ordeal into bullet points. I’d seen films about the Blitz. I’d read statistics. But Foyle’s War made me feel the weight of repetition — the cumulative exhaustion of merely carrying on. And it made me realize that someday, people will likely flatten our pandemic into the same kind of summary. They’ll hear about masks, vaccines, and shutdowns and overlook the lived texture: the dread in a cough, the claustrophobia of endless childcare, the way Zoom turned colleagues into postage-stamp faces.

Watching Foyle’s War also nudged me to imagine the stories we might someday tell about this era. I can picture a future detective series opening with ominous news reports and empty supermarket shelves, weaving through Zoom mishaps, protests, winter surges, rule-breakers, and quiet acts of heroism. It isn’t the show any of us want to watch right now. But, eventually, art helps us organize our grief — the way Foyle’s War does for a different generation’s trauma.

What the series ultimately honors is the dignity of ordinary endurance. Its characters suffer, adapt, argue, mourn — and make room for hardship the way one accommodates a long-term houseguest. When Victory in Europe finally arrives, they feel relief intertwined with loss and disorientation. The world has changed; they have, too.

I sometimes envy that definitive ending. The pandemic offered no single bell-ringing moment. Instead, we slid uncertainly from emergency to adjustment, from crisis to uneasy normal. Yet watching Foyle’s War, I recognize something steadier beneath the chaos: resilience stitched together from small decisions — kindness, patience, duty, humor — repeated day after day.

Those aren’t the kinds of triumphs that make headlines. But they are the ones that carry people through history.

And perhaps, when future generations look back at our strange, suspended years, that is what will be worth remembering.