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Notes -
The Pitt as a lagging culture war indicator
So I’ve been watching The Pitt with my wife lately.
The premise of the show is to follow doctors and nurses in an ER over a single 15-hour shift, much like the old show 24.
The show has been praised for its accuracy and I certainly find it intense at times.
That being said, I’m halfway through the Emmy-nominated season and while the medical drama part is solid, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the culture war aspects of the show.
According to Wikipedia, development began late 2023 after the writers strike and into 2024. The show premiered in early 2025 and has already been renewed.
It’s good and I’ve enjoyed watching it.
That being said….
There’s a bit of a culture war time capsule effect that shows up from time to time. It’s intermittent but fairly heavy-handed I think:
It’s hard to convey from the descriptions but there are two themes I want to comment on.
The first is what is treated as something to joke about vs a Very Special Message. We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky. No joking around though when it comes to using terms like “unhoused.”
The other major theme that to me comes out strongly is a vibe of knowing the answers to all these political issues. There’s never any exploration or even acknowledgment of a controversy beyond as an obstacle to be dealt with.
For instance (mild spoilers) the girl coming in for an abortion evidently missed the 11 week deadline. No problem! Doctors will just lie. The mother of the patient isn’t on board but that’s ok the doctors will browbeat her into it and suggest the daughter will never speak to her again if it happens.
Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife—she claims without evidence or corroboration that he’s molesting their daughter and we’re horrified to learn that she might be the one in trouble!
Overall though, the attitude is one of “we know the answers but sometimes society isn’t quite caught up yet.”
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
I am a doctor and an extremely anti-woke consumer of media (although if it's good...it's good).
The Pitt didn't bother me.
The reason is that most woke stuff kills verisimilitude (think fantasy filled with black people in clearly Northern Europe).
However in this case this stuff is adding verisimilitude because that's how the field is. Especially at a teaching hospital and especially the trainees are crazy far left (because it's part of the admission package and curriculum) or are just good at pretending so they don't get ostracized.
A small sample is the TV in the surgical lounge - we abuse trainees all the time (unfortunately), if you fuck up suturing? You will go home crying. Put a subjective finding in the objective section of your two minute patient presentation at 4am? Crying.
In this sort of environment the trainees still feel comfortable changing the TV from Fox (its always that) to MSNBC and then breaking it/hiding the remote/locking it/whatever.
I give fantasy stuff huge leeway, because it's fantasy you can do whatever, though a specific trope's repetition (black people lopsidedly in everything) is bad. The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.
Best example I can think of is Game of Throne's "we aren't sure if they are bastards or not" .......are they half Black? If so.... Recasting debacle.
I just watched "Wheel of Time" and it's so, so bad in that regard.
Like, it's a major part of the worldbuilding that the world is fragmented. Every country has its own description and way of speaking. You can easily tell where someone is from. The main character, especially, grew up in a super isolated small town, and everyone looks at him weird because he has red hair. It's very obvious that his mother was an "outlander" as they call it. Big plot hook mystery what happened there.
Meanwhile that same town has two black women and... no one bats an eye? No one asks questions? Huh, OK. And of course they just happen to be the two women with the most power in the town. In fact, their role has been cranked up even larger than it was in the source material, stealing a lot of important scenes away from the main character.
The same pattern seems to repeat endlessly, with every single person of authority made to be a black woman, amping up their power and authority, and no one seems to question how this came to be. It's somehow both a post-racial utopia where noone mentions race, but also one with extremely clear racial boundaries.
It actually makes things pretty confusing. To be fair, it's a long book series with way too many characters, so I can appreciate how they have to cut a lot to make it work for television. But they put so much emphasis on the black characters that the white characters are left kind of pointless, with nothing to do. They just take up space on screen and make it harder to remember everyone's names.
And the extra frustrating thing is the series has dealing with increasing diversity built right in! If they could have just been patient the could have had a few really heavy handed episodes on it, and they would have made sense.
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"Rings of Power" got into trouble for exactly this. I'd give Queen-Regent Míriel a pass (we don't know in canon anything about her mother's family or who her mother was, and there were good Haradrim/Easterlings who interacted with the Edain, so it's not impossible that her maternal family were persons of colour) but the Hobbits, sorry, Harfoots and Stoors, were just too much. A lot of jokes about "and is the final season going to end with they get to the Shire and then there's a mass genocide where only the white Hobbits survive?" since this is meant to be prequel to the LoTR movies and that is established canon that the Hobbits are all white.
I'm waiting for season three to see how they write themselves out of all the corners they've written themselves into, but I wonder will we ever get that season three in the end?
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They didn't even need to do that!! The Sea People are canonically black, and so is the Seanchan princess!
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Reminds me of a scene in Rings of Power where two tavern drunks abuse this guy for being an elf, calling him 'knife-ears'. As if that is the thing you would notice in faux-medieval England.
Plus he's the one single black Elf in the company. Which is okay, I guess, since all the other white Elves get murderised by the Orcs later so at least it didn't happen to anyone important. It's even dumber because the "Southlands" are what later becomes "Mordor", and the Elven garrison is there specifically because the ancestors of the Southlanders fought on the side of Morgoth.
So it's bordered by "to the northeast and east, Rhûn; to the southeast, Khand; and to the south, Harad" which means that the population there has every reason to be racially mixed. But no, we get the majority of the actors with speaking parts being white and racist to The One Single Black Elf, while the good person is the healer Bronwyn played by an Iranian-British actress. I guess the "racism bad, mmkay?" point wouldn't have landed the same had it been brown or black characters abusing a white Elf.
Maybe it's just me, but Cruz Cordova is such a bad actor. I couldn't believe the reviews praising him, he's as wooden as his breastplate in the role.
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