Men and Progressive Culture on "The Pitt"
When is it ok to be the old kind of tough guy?
In Season 2, Episode 8 of Hospital drama The Pitt, the Emergency Room doctors stitch up a party girl who has bitten a chunk off her own tongue while drunk. Even as they sew she dips in and out of consciousness, but she is aware enough to confirm she’s an everyday drinker. As we watched at home, my wife and I speculated how this would play out in an Irish hospital… with an exhortation to cop yourself on and stop being an idiot, some grudging admiration for being such a character, maybe a lament from the doctor that they haven’t had time for a pint recently themselves. We were certain it wouldn’t end with the girl being referred to rehab, which is what happens in the show - an hilariously American reaction. These little cultural quirks and tics of The Pitt are one of the things that keep you watching; but attitudes to alcohol are not the biggest or strangest of it’s blindspots, not by a long shot.
The Pitt is very popular. It uses the virtues of peak TV to tell its story in a different way from ER, its closest equivalent, a ‘90s megahit with which it shares key cast member Noah Wyle. Over a 15 episode season each hour in the Emergency Room (A&E to you and me) unfolds as a single episode set in real time. TV ratings aren’t as easy to parse as they were in the past, but the season 2 finale got 9.7 million viewers in one weekend and averaged 15.4 million viewers per episode. That puts it in an elite category of the 5-10 most watched online shows.
Sometimes putting a show like this - which is ultimately a soap opera - under the microscope can be a little much; not every show can stand up to it. The Pitt demands closer examination, however. It has consciously adopted a “ripped from the headlines” strategy where the storylines from the news and current affairs, various other social crises, form the backbone of each episode and season. In The Pitt’s case the headline it’s ripped from is that of a Salon Article, or maybe a Pod Save America episode. It’s explicit purpose is to advocate for progressive stances on political and cultural issues.
Trump’s 2nd electoral victory was unexpected and total, and seemed to speak to some final turn in popular culture. The term Vibe Shift was coined to explain this wider sense that overt Progressivism had lost whatever popular legitimacy it ever had, and become sort of uncool. The sense that there had been a shift wasn’t wrong; there were plenty of concrete examples of it including tribune of the boomers Steven Colbert having his show taken away, various Pixar movies being cancelled or rewritten totally to leave out progressive story elements, athletes doing Trump dances to celebrate touchdowns. But these have to be seen in context as World War One style victories - the right (or really just the not-dedicatedly-progressive side) marched it’s troops into the guns, and after a months of bloody battle gained piece of ground of no strategic importance equivalent to a couple of square feet. Popular culture has almost entirely bounced back to its previous position, and nothing embodies the centrality or resilience of progressive political messaging than The Pitt.
