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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22929 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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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:

  • a medical student is lectured on intent vs impact after offering the aid of a social work to a homeless mom
  • a trans woman is treated for a cut and a med student draws attention to the “misgendering” of insurance records. We’re told it’s cool to have fixed this
  • we’re shown the “correct” way to interact with an autistic patient. A sr resident has apparently never done this before and is in awe of a second year “neuro-divergent” resident who helps the patient
  • a 17 year old girl is brought in for an abortion. The doctors commit fraud to make it happen and even talk the kids mom into it

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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 understand 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.

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