The Subtle Woke Messaging in Hit Show "The Pitt"

So hopefully like me, you had a few extra hours on your hands this summer. Although I was very busy, but I did manage to find some downtime. And I don't know, when I'm in my downtime and I'm watching a TV show, I don't really want to watch news related dramas. I'm not really that into, you know, I don't watch like the morning show or any of that nonsense, but I do enjoy true crime, and I like medical dramas as a rule. There haven't been many of them out there that have been like really great in a long time, but I loved the show House. I loved the show ER. There have been some spinoffs, like about Chicago, there was one and, you know, sort of not spinoffs exactly, but sort of attempts at doing medical drama that I've watched over the years, but there hasn't been a good one in a long time. And there was a rumor that some of the cast and producers of the show ER were trying to get together and form a spinoff and air a spinoff. And I loved ER. I thought that was so good. It was gripping, you know, medical drama. Well, it didn't come together and whatever, I guess it petered out until we had news of this show, The Pit. Now I watched it on Amazon Prime, but I guess it's an HBO Max production. And it is in fact, basically the ER spinoff that they thought about making, but never got around to. It stars Noah Wiley, who of course played on the original ER across from George Clooney and Julianna Margulies. He was the young doctor at the time and med student doctor. And he was, you know, the green doe-eyed, know-nothing, coming-of-age doctor back then. And they did, according to what I read, try to actually use him. It was, hold on, I'm reading here. It says, before The Pit, Noah Wiley and producers John Wells and R. Scott Jemel tried to develop an ER sequel featuring Wiley's character, Dr. John Carter. They negotiated with Michael Crichton's estate because of course ER was based on Michael Crichton's work. But the negotiations collapsed and then they created The Pit with the same star, same producers and same emergency room setting. Well, that got them sued. Apparently Crichton's estate is claiming that The Pit, this show, is an unauthorized ER reboot, which is probably why I was so drawn to it. But I was excited to watch it because it's now done two seasons. It's going to have a third. And I thought, okay, this might be something that I would enjoy. So I pull up, you know, get down in the family room on our couch. I've got my blankie. I'm all excited to watch The Pit. And I love Noah Wiley. I think he's so great. I loved him in the first ER. Who could forget Noah Wiley as this charming, you know, know nothing, learn everything Dr. Carter. Yes. These scenes are the reasons why I loved him. I loved his character and I thought he was so earnest and likable and thought I'll watch him in anything. And then what happened next? We got to see him in A Few Good Men playing yet again, this young, earnest Marine who was called to the and was asked by Kevin Bacon how, where in the U.S. Marine Corps manual it told him that one of his duties was to give a code red, which he had testified on direct with Tom Cruise that they understood was part of their duties as Marines. And he admitted it's not in the Marine manual. And then came this moment with Tom Cruise on redirect. Corporal, would you turn to the page in this book that says where the mess hall is, please? Well, Lieutenant Caffey, that's not in the book, sir. You mean to say in all your time at Gitmo, you've never had a meal? No, sir. Three squares a day, sir. I don't understand. How did you know where the mess hall was if it's not in this book? Well, I guess I just followed the crowd at chow time, sir. No more questions. Corporal Barnes, you may step down. Thank you, sir. So, yes, who doesn't love Noah Wiley? Okay. And I'd never thought of him as a particularly political guy. He didn't associate any of his roles or choices with that. I had heard that he'd done some advocacy work for medical facilities and like better treatment of medical staff. And I thought, okay, well, that tracks. That's fine. He's you know, kind of thinks he's a doctor because he played one on TV, but I don't care. He probably knows a fair amount from having spent all those years playing a doctor about the actual concerns of doctors and nurses. All right. So that leads me to the pit. There I am under the blankie. And, you know, it starts off the way you might think a medical drama would start off. And it's got all of like the cases and it's got the cast of characters and I'm into it. Everyone's attractive, which I appreciate. You know, I don't like staring at unattractive people on my television screen. I think I'm not alone in that. And they've done a good job of finding beautiful people to star in these roles. So hats off on that. Then we get to episode two and my hackles started to go up a little. Okay, just a little. And I'm going to show you why. And just before I get to this, this is the reason that we're doing this. Everyone knows that there's a liberal bias in news. That's if you dispute that, you're clueless and not worth talking to. But the indoctrination that our children and we suffer through, if we are any place right of, you know, AOC, is pervasive. We have to deal with it in virtually every facet of our lives. It's not just, oh, you know, avoid the New York Times and you can go about your business. That is not what life is like for a conservative. It's everywhere. You can't avoid it. It's in the ads that are on the subway walls. It's in the billboards that you see in Times Square. It's of course, yes, in your media diet, no matter where you go, even in the supposedly fair and balanced shows, it'll rear its ugly head. And it's there in Hollywood, of course, when you go to see movies, you see their agenda pushed all the time. And on regular television, it's in everything. Even if you're just trying to go for entertainment, you know, if you're going to go for television, that's about politics, you might expect it, right? But this is like a hospital drama. I loved House. That was another one. I think, I think I mentioned that, but like, I wasn't looking for House for politics and I didn't get politics in House. For the first time since World War II, our national debt has exceeded the gross domestic product. America's reckless government spending keeps catching up with us. Higher inflation, higher prices, higher cost of interest payments on the national debt. Every dollar Washington spends on interest is a dollar it has to tax, borrow or print. Smart retirement planners prepare for potential setbacks and they can do that by diversifying with a time-tested asset known for weathering the storm. 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Oh, how wrong I would have been had I let my kids watch The Pit, in which they have no interest, so they weren't part of this without me. But I did not appreciate. OK, so this is so there's that issue that, like we get exposed to left wing politics and messaging as virtuous at every turn in our lives. It's a miracle there are any conservatives left. Truly, it's incredible that there are still people voting Republican and actually making Republicans win. As we know, at least in 2024, most recently, it's incredible given the amount of programming meant to turn people into good little left wing ideologues. So I'm watching the show. Episode two comes up and they kick it off with I mean, everybody in the in the whole show is predominantly minority. So there are some white people. We'll get to this. They're almost universally bad or backward or deeply flawed. So we'll talk about that in a minute. But here you're going to see the young white doctor, the male doctor. He's a med student, I think. And then he's he graduates later. Get very, very confused about Joyce, who is a black woman coming in on the gurney and enter a brown skin woman who is. She is Indian to save the day. Her name is Dr. Samira Mohan, and she is the compassionate third year resident who saves the day. Watch this. Drug seeking woman kicked off a city bus for disrupting and disturbing. Screaming for narcotics. We found an empty. He's been uncooperative and combative. Stop fighting. **** down on the cops. I'm sick. Okay, stop. Everybody stop. How's the pain, Joyce? Oh, a little better. Starting IV dialogue for an hour. You can press this button if you need a little extra. That only works once an hour, though. So don't crazy. Could I confer with you? Yeah. You seem surprised by the opiate dosage. Seemed a little high. So was her pain. How do you know she's not drug seeking? Can't fake a hemoglobin of six. Again, I'm so sorry about how you were treated when you first arrived. Not everyone who works here is accustomed to dealing with sickle cell. We will be doing everything possible from here on in to manage Joyce's crisis. Okay, so we have it all. All right. You've got the black sickle cell anemia sufferer and her brown wife who you know with whom she's cuddling and who's very supportive of her. And then you've got the brown Indian doctor FEMA. These are all females scolding the clueless white guy who doesn't understand anything about sickle cell, even though for sure you learn about that in medical school and just thinks that she's a drug seeker. What? Because I guess she's black and she's asking for more drugs. And it takes the heroic brown lady to step in to say, oh, stop it. You don't understand sickle cell. And nobody in these hospitals understands sickle cell. And, you know, leave it to me to save the day. Then there's a follow up scene between the two because they got to be lesbians, too. They're both women of color and they're lesbians and they have sickle cell. And the white man doesn't understand that he's got everything. Here's the second part of their little story. So if you want to make each other laugh, make each other laugh, make each other deliriously happy. They're kissing. Sorry, I meant to get a machine in front of you. Are you kidding me? You two are the sweetest. I never got to see this kind of love between a married couple. My dad died when I was 13. I'm so sorry. Yeah, me too. He's the reason why I got into medicine and the reason why I'm conducting research on racial disparity in the ER. I'm doing a retrospective chart review on the last five years of patients of color. Is that how you knew it was going to be? We don't treat sickle cell here as well as they do in other hospitals, but I'm hoping to change. OK, so now you've got the two women of color kissing and loving on each other and the other doctor who's the other woman of color who's a doctor sitting there. I've never seen this kind of love between a married couple. What? What is that? Oh, like only women of color who are lesbians are actually ever in love. What kind of messaging is that? And then, of course, you've got to get the dig in about how any disease related to black people is by definition understudied in this hospital doesn't handle it well. I, I, the hero, I'm going to change all that. May not always agree, but we are always going to talk about it and respect. No BS, no agenda, no fear.