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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.
There was a TV Show a few years back called New Amsterdam and it was the peakness of Woke. It wasn't really well received or popular but it certainly was probably a signal of the high water mark of the popularity of that ideology I think. But it could also have been a very well disguised parody. I couldn't take it after a couple seasons so there could quite possibly be better examples than these, I wish I could find clips of them but it's hard to beat tumors caused by racism.
There was a whole episode about getting people to take the COVID vaccine because their freezer broke or something and they need to use up all the vaccines in a small period of time. So they get the word out and people show up but when the Chief notices that everyone waiting in line to get it is white he cancels the plan to give it out so he can give it to black people but when he approaches the black community over it they say they've all gotten their vaccine and he needs to look in his own backyard, to which the token conservative character says they haven't gotten the vaccine because they're waiting until people at risk get it, so the Chief decides to tell him to gather all his conservative friends and they all show up just in time for the arbitrary timer on the vaccine's viability to run out and nobody get vaccinated at all.
Another episode is about a previous Chief from the 70s-80s getting cancelled for throwing away donated blood during the AIDS crisis. That's it. Apart from doing that he was perfectly coded as a good left-leaning guy he did great stuff for minorities and the underprivileged but he breaks down and admits that they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out. His legacy destroyed and the new Chief, disgusted at his decision, has to confirm to others that yes, it was true this man made a mistake with blood 50 years ago and must be erased from history. In the end, the old man leaves in shame as his picture is removed from the hospital wall.
I remember an episode where a minor was getting a court injunction against the hospital because they said their treatment was bad and the court responded by shutting down on childrens' aspects of the hospital until it was investigated and the first thing the psychiatrist says to the Chief about it is "You need to sort this out now, they're already shutting down our trans children's clinic."
To me, The Pitt in many ways seems more preachy even though the episodes are dedicated to mostly medical treatment because it's often injected into situations apropos of nothing and the resolutions feel bad because they're presented in the narrative in a way that feels like they're strawmanning/weakmanning an argument and then declaring victory.
Wait, what? This is insane revisionism, the bloody scandal was in the other direction!
https://www.dw.com/en/infected-blood-scandal-a-horrifying-global-disaster/a-70093762
Yes you can screen blood, but this was only developed in the mid 80s and had high failure rate, for example it detected antigens which are made by the body after months of infection, so a freshly infected could still contaminate the blood supply.
Yeah, but gay rights activists are angry that MSM can’t donate blood, because they feel it stigmatizes being gay.
But I agree with you, people valuing defeating stigma more than protecting people from serious diseases is a really bad thing. I think the gay community has long been in denial about how seriously HIV/AIDS created rather than reflected stigma against gay men, and my understanding is it became something of a rite of passage back in the day — “I’m pozzed, so I no longer need to worry about it.”
The US recently changed those policies, and monogamous MSM are allowed to donate blood. If it helps, they shortly afterward also allowed "residents of Europe in the 1990s" as well, because maybe they don't have Mad Cow.
But yes, lots of people died of HIV from tainted blood transfusions in the 80-90s. Isaac Asimov is the famous example that comes to mind, although maybe in some of those cases it was used as a cover story.
There was a joke repeated in And the band played on from the early days of AIDS:
What's the hardest part of getting AIDS? Convincing your wife you're Haitian.
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