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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30851 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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You’re actually underselling the wokeness of the Pitt. Some mildly SPOILERY events:

  • A black woman comes into the hospital with extreme pain. A white doctor thinks she is faking the pain to get painkillers, but a non-white doctor comes in and declares that she has sickle cell anemia and really is in pain.

  • Later on, a white main comes into the hospital with extreme pain. The white doctors believe him, but a non-white doctor correctly infers that he’s a drug addict.

  • A white family has a kid with measles because they didn’t get him vaccinated. They then delay treatment almost to the point of the kid dying because the mother “does her own research” with blogs.

  • A white man in the waiting room is repeatedly rude and causes escalating problems because he has to keep waiting to be seen by the doctors while more injured people get treatment before him. At one point, the white man complains about other people getting treatment with his tax dollars. Later, the white man punches a female administrator in the face and says something MAGA-y.

  • A white woman in the waiting room initiates a fight with someone because the latter person is wearing a hospital mask. IIRC, the white woman even screams something about Fauci lying.

  • An obese woman comes in with a vague problem. A doctor tells her to lose weight and the obese woman gets upset. Another doctor comes in, finds the real problem (which isn’t related to obesity) and scolds the first doctor for being fixated on the obesity. 

  • A very old black guy comes into the hospital and prompts a speech by the main white doctor about how a group of black doctors made some important medical discovery 50 years ago that is underappreciated today.

This is just off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of these.

Left out the one inadvertent right wing culture war. Female doc reveals that she had aborted a male doc's kid without him knowing (he of course totally understands) is now struggling with infertility, has a miscarriage on shift.

Not even wokeness can stay the powerful dramatic impulse to write a story of karmic retribution.

It's not just the presence of these events, it's the absence of others.

I remember being shocked as a kid when a bad guy in CSI: Miami turned out to be black. In almost every other case it was some sort of white person. And oh boy was it righteous and great when a white man tried to frame an innocent black man and got caught because of it. Gave an immense justice infused confirmation bias high to my progressive young self.

Re-watched Robocop (1987) recently. I hadn't remembered that, though it's set in Detroit "twenty minutes into the future", pretty much all the criminals are white.

Criminal Minds goes even further in that regard as it features multiple black bad guys (and girls). In one episode it even features a white woman who makes a false rape allegation.

While there are obvious political-correctness-related reasons for this, you do have to consider the 'Dog Bites Man' angle. I wouldn't want detective shows to reflect real crime statistics, because most of the homicides making up those statistics are boring and obvious. 'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.' Right. Not exactly gripping drama. When it's an intelligent, wealthy man hiding a dark secret using an intricate fake alibi - then you have good drama, precisely because it's unusual relative to the real world.

Most of the homicides are boring and obvious but some of them are really funny because of how dumb the criminals are. 'The gun just happened to go off'. They did their drug deal under CCTV. Or the dumb, crass nicknames they have on 'encrypted' messaging for drug importation. Or how they brag about killing this guy in their chat group. Or how they realize only when prompted by a judge that while they're trying to cheat on tax they're only making it worse for themselves, so they completely reverse their story.

Dumb people lying badly is funny and makes the audience feel superior. I'm not a good storyteller and don't remember too much of what I've heard but there's great potential.

Oh, there's potential, but it's not going to scratch that whodunnit itch. It's something else.

'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.'

That's... pretty much Season 1 of The Wire to a T, which is widely acknowledged as one of the best seasons of television ever produced.

Yes, but it's a social realist drama where a big part of what makes it engaging is getting to know the low-rent ghetto drug dealers really well and understanding their quirks and motivations. Per @WandererintheWilderness's point, I don't think an episodic murder mystery series set in the same milieu would be engaging: in a murder mystery, the killer has to be someone unsuspected, and solving the mystery has to be at least something of an intellectual challenge. "Low-rent ghetto drug dealer murders rival drug dealer by shooting him in the back of the head" is prime fodder for a crime drama, but probably not for a self-contained episodic murder mystery: there is no mystery, about the identity of the perpetrator, their motive or their method.

The Wire exists. As best as I can recall there is only a single real murder investigation in the wire that's not gang related. In fact there's an entire storyline about no one giving a shit about gang murders because they're not interesting or meritorious enough to devote resources to investigate.

The wire is a character drama focused mostly on the criminals as long-run characters in a broader narrative, though. Very different genre than episodic investigative dramas from the cop's perspective.

You can make an interesting show about investigating lowlives shooting each other. It just wouldn't look anything like CSI.

Okay, but the Wire has more investigative elements than most shows procedural or not. Procedural pretty much really only means self-contained because most investigative shows are filled with gobs of pointless drama and soap-opera b plots that are strung through many episodes or like any British investigative show about 40 minutes of the victim's family arguing about vague things to present them as red herrings. Law & Order is probably the only thing that represents a show that's just investigations contained in an episode, maybe the early CSI seasons as well.

This is an astute observation, but I assume you can reason out what the result would be if an entire generation or two of Americans were raised only being exposed to the counterfactual reality presented in media, with no knowledge of our exposure to the mundane-but-not-telegenic underlying reality. They’d have an extremely skewed understanding of what the world is actually like.

Well, yes. But ultimately the problem is people forming their worldviews based on fiction instead of balancing their intellectual diet with non-fiction or, better yet, first-hand experience of the real world. It's a problem as old as Don Quixote, and I don't think the correct lesson to take from Don Quixote is 'how dare those irresponsible poets fill their ballads with giants, virtuous knights, and loyal servants? we need more books about windmills and scumbags to fix impressionable readers' sense of reality'.

(Granted, biases might still cause writers to limit themselves to a particular kind of man biting a particular kind of dog. But that's a whole other conversation than one about realism.)

I knew it was this sort of show after just one episode and refused my wife’s request to watch further. I have a very well honed woke entertainment detector and nope out the instant I see this sort of thing

A very old black guy comes into the hospital and prompts a speech by the main white doctor about how a group of black doctors made some important medical discovery 50 years ago that is underappreciated today.

It was definitely a Special Episode kind of moment and speech, but at least that one was about working in Pittsburgh history like the old guy on life support having worked with Mr. Rogers and his family reminiscing before they unplug him.

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of these.

Everything Santos and Mohan says or does? Slight exaggeration, but not much. Certainly not accidental that they keep getting rewarded for hubris, while nervous Whittaker is a punchline with the scrub changes and his living situation.

It was definitely a Special Episode kind of moment and speech

After years and years of not watching tv/streaming shows/movies/what-have-you, they all feel like A Very Special Episode when I'm forced to watch something. It all feels like a lecture where the lecturer views me as an especially dim child.

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