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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.
I find this perspective a bit baffling. Have people forgotten how the artifice of fiction works? The idea that what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe, hidden-cameras style, in every detail, is a very modern idea and a pretty dumb one. It's how you get people making convoluted theories about code-names and plastic surgery to explain how James Bond turns into a different guy in-between movies. It's just a recast, bro. The 'real' James Bond looks neither exactly like Sean Connery nor exactly like George Lazenby. They're actors. Stand-ins. Race-blind casting in historical dramas works in the same way. A black actor is playing a character who, "in-universe", the audience is expected to understand wasn't actually black.
If you find this sort of thing immersion-breaking, fair enough. I certainly understand the appeal of television which leans really hard into hyper-researched realism; Rings of Power must particularly rankle because the Jackson films were built on this sort of thing. But complaining that black RAF pilots are "historically inaccurate" makes about as much sense as complaining that if Kermit is supposed to be a frog, he shouldn't look like he's made out of felt.
I look forward to seeing an Asian Cassius Clay and a white Idi Amin.
The conventions of movies and TV are that your actor should look like your character as best as you can; unlike in live theatre, race-blind casting isn't typically a thing. Of course there's a lot of latitude -- Naveen Andrews isn't Iraqi but they can get away with casting him as a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard because the audience doesn't know an Indian from an Iraqi anyway. It doesn't extend to filling WWII-era London with black people or making a remake of Roots with half of the African characters looking like Norwegians.
You can argue that the convention ought to be broken, but then you have to deal with what I noted in my first sentence and the Roots remake -- you also have to justify making it work one way only.
Well, that's where the usual affirmative-action argument comes in - "black actors deserve as many job opportunities and chances to shine as white actors, and they won't get them unless you go for race-blind casting and compromise on the convention of casting for physical resemblance". Notably, this argument works even without ascribing racist animus to any casting director - it's just an emergent consequence of e.g. most historical dramas being based on western history.
And you can certainly reject that argument if you want, for all sorts of reasons. I don't buy it all the way myself (I personally don't find race-blind casting distracting, and would encourage more productions to use it if it were up to me; but equally, if a director is really committed to a lifelike historical vision, I think that's their prerogative and it doesn't make them a racist, which is a hot take these days). The point I wanted to make is just that "the convention ought to be broken" is the serious pro-race-blind-casting position, which means the endless arguments about the plausibility of black WWII pilots or black Hobbits are a distraction. If they want to be taken seriously - and granted, that is an uphill battle to an unfair degree - retractors need to ask more questions like "Is it detrimental to a film's artistic worth for a white WWII pilot to be portrayed by a black actor?", and to make fewer snide comments about the apparent population genetics of the Ring of Powers Shire being implausible, which is, again, missing the point on a level with complaining that a Muppet doesn't look like a real barnyard animal.
You have chosen an especially poor example with Rings Of Power, because it belies either an ignorance about the purpose behind Tolkien’s work, or else an intentional disregard for it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories are intended as an ersatz mythos for the historical peoples of the British Isles; the various peoples and factions of the world are rough stand-ins or symbolic idealizations of the various ethnic groups and their myths which have coalesced into the modern (white) peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. (And, by extension, the Celtic and North Germanic peoples of Continental Europe.) Gondor as a rough analogue for Roman-Celtic Britain, Rohan as the horse-obsessed Anglo-Saxons, Elves as the remnants of the pre-Aryan Neolithic peoples, etc. To the extent that this matters to you, it should matter that the actors involved at least plausibly physically resemble somebody belonging to, or descending from, those peoples. It matters that they’re white in a way that it doesn’t matter if the actors in a Star Wars film are white.
You dodged Nybbler’s pretty incisive point about a non-black actor playing a historically black individual. If a director set out to make a Harriet Tubman biopic and chose to cast Saiorse Ronan in the title role, there is no amount of “she just really crushed the audition, and I’ve always wanted to work with her” that would suffice to excuse what would be (correctly) interpreted at a slap in the face to black Americans. They own Harriet Tubman’s legacy in a way that white people obviously don’t. She means something to them, it’s important for them to see themselves in her, and pretty much everybody understands that.
So then the question is, are white people allowed to own any historical figures or stories of their own? Is it right and fair for white British people, a great many of whom are directly descended from RAF pilots, to expect that a casting director honor the reality of what those men looked like, sounded like, etc.? Is it fair for Brits to want to see themselves reflected accurately on screen? What about their fictional/mythical but still important figures? King Arthur? Sherlock Holmes? Jeeves and Wooster? Mr. Darcy?
I expect that your answer might be, “Sure, but that doesn’t mean any individual casting director has any obligation to care about that.” But I don’t think you actually believe that. I think you recognize that there is an explicitly redistributive aspect to modern race-swapped casting. A desire to make up for past wrongs and throw a bone to non-white actors who’ve had a relatively rougher go of it than their white companions. Isn’t that why you would “encourage” directors to keep doing it if you had the power to do so?
No. You are still missing the point I was trying to make. By all means, perhaps it matters that the characters are white. My argument is that (the pro-race-blind-casting position is that) it shouldn't matter if a character who is theoretically white within the story is played by an actor who is visibly black. This is precisely what I meant about Hobbit genetics being neither here nor there to the debate: I am not denying that the Hobbits are meant to be white. I am saying that you can cast a bunch of black actors as white Hobbits.
Well, yeah. Notably, however, this is a very different argument from it being wrong because Saiorse Ronan is physically too different from the historical Tubman and casting her would be unrealistic. The outrage would be rooted in the racial politics of denying a job from some other, black actress who rightfully "deserved" it more than a white actress ever could. If, say, a black actress with dwarfism were to be cast as Harriet Tubman, this would scarcely be more physically accurate than casting Saiorse Ronan, and yet I predict you'd see much fewer complaints.
(Also, in an ideal world, I, for one, believe a director who sincerely wanted to make that movie for the reasons you ascribe to him ought to be able to make it and not be branded a racist for having made it. That's neither here nor there because I'm trying to steelman the pro-race-blind-casting position as it actually exists, not mount my own argument, but I thought it would be worth clarifying so we know where we stand.)
Indeed I do, and I've recognized it explicitly in this thread.
Buddy… appearance is part of acting. One uses one’s physical body to portray actions, emotion, intent, etc. This is also why we use costuming and make-up to alter actors’ appearances to better fit the story we’re attempting to tell. The hypothetical “steel-manned pro-race-blind-casting advocate” would readily acknowledge the absurdity of making a Pride and Prejudice film in which one of the actors (and only one) decided to wear a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and cargo shorts while the rest of the actors wore period clothing. The only artistically-defensible reason to do so is if one were trying to make some sort of meta-commentary. And sure, I could definitely imagine an artfully-done version of this, intentionally poking at the conventions of filmmaking and storytelling, forcing audiences to confront their own expectations, etc. That’s its own genre, though, and is obviously very distinct from genres in which verisimilitude is valued and important.
What you’re failing to grapple with is the distinct expectations that separate different genres. The Muppets can get away with what they do because they’re in a specific genre in which verisimilitude does not, and cannot, exist as an expectation. There are no real-world analogues for talking frogs and green furry guys who live in trash cans. The conventions of the genre have specific demands and expectations, and the audience is already bought into them. What you’re now asking audiences to do is alter their expectations such that all genres throw out previous expectations of visual verisimilitude, and adopt ones closer to madcap puppet comedy. And you don’t seem to have a coherent artistic reason why, since you don’t seem to have properly internalized why so many genres had that expectation in the first place.
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