HBO’s excellent medical propaganda
This deserves loud pushback.
In last week’s episode of The Pitt, an unhoused neurodivergent sex worker received physician-assisted suicide courtesy of Obamacare. And they say television has lost its values.
All right, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. Now in the middle of its second season, HBO Max’s Emmy-winning hospital drama is to progressives what Fox’s “War on Terror” white-knuckler 24 used to be to the Right: entertainment that scratched us exactly where we itched. In The Pitt’s enlightened universe, doctors are not just trustworthy but saintly, ever ready to intercede for you and me. Every failure is “systemic,” and few problems exist that can’t be solved with more and better government cheese. If In Treatment, HBO’s late-aughts psychotherapeutic procedural, made a certain kind of viewer yearn for the psychiatrist’s couch, expect The Pitt to do the same for the emergency room. No, we don’t really want to spend an afternoon in the care of Noah Wyle’s arch-compassionate team. On the other hand, maybe we actually kind of do?
Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending physician at an overcrowded Pittsburgh hospital. Along with his staff of residents, med students, and nurses, Robby patches up the Steel City’s working poor with an almost Mother Teresan goodheartedness and skill. In Season 1, confronted with overdoses, drownings, and a host of other crises great and small, the team nevertheless found time to deliver the soapiness that the best medical series have always brought. Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif), then a second-year resident, spent the show’s opening hours in an ankle monitor, having assaulted her louche ex-husband’s latest squeeze. Dr. Heather Collins (Tracey Ifeachor), a more senior MD, had a miscarriage mid-shift. Need I even add that she continued to work?
Season 2’s prevailing tone is at once more serious and less sorrowful. Mostly gone are the staff’s personal foibles and follies, but vanished, too, is the post-COVID-19 despair that hung over the inaugural episodes like an aerosol haze. When viewers first met Robby, the man was a nervous wreck, lost in inescapable memories of the ER’s plague years. In the latest run, he is a font of tranquility and strength, a calming influence so powerful that one might hire him to wind down wars.
Noah Wylie in ‘The Pitt.’ (Courtesy of HBO Max)
What both seasons have in common is the sense that their plotlines have been ripped from the “Policy” section of . Among Season 1’s medical …
This deserves loud pushback.
In last week’s episode of The Pitt, an unhoused neurodivergent sex worker received physician-assisted suicide courtesy of Obamacare. And they say television has lost its values.
All right, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. Now in the middle of its second season, HBO Max’s Emmy-winning hospital drama is to progressives what Fox’s “War on Terror” white-knuckler 24 used to be to the Right: entertainment that scratched us exactly where we itched. In The Pitt’s enlightened universe, doctors are not just trustworthy but saintly, ever ready to intercede for you and me. Every failure is “systemic,” and few problems exist that can’t be solved with more and better government cheese. If In Treatment, HBO’s late-aughts psychotherapeutic procedural, made a certain kind of viewer yearn for the psychiatrist’s couch, expect The Pitt to do the same for the emergency room. No, we don’t really want to spend an afternoon in the care of Noah Wyle’s arch-compassionate team. On the other hand, maybe we actually kind of do?
Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending physician at an overcrowded Pittsburgh hospital. Along with his staff of residents, med students, and nurses, Robby patches up the Steel City’s working poor with an almost Mother Teresan goodheartedness and skill. In Season 1, confronted with overdoses, drownings, and a host of other crises great and small, the team nevertheless found time to deliver the soapiness that the best medical series have always brought. Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif), then a second-year resident, spent the show’s opening hours in an ankle monitor, having assaulted her louche ex-husband’s latest squeeze. Dr. Heather Collins (Tracey Ifeachor), a more senior MD, had a miscarriage mid-shift. Need I even add that she continued to work?
Season 2’s prevailing tone is at once more serious and less sorrowful. Mostly gone are the staff’s personal foibles and follies, but vanished, too, is the post-COVID-19 despair that hung over the inaugural episodes like an aerosol haze. When viewers first met Robby, the man was a nervous wreck, lost in inescapable memories of the ER’s plague years. In the latest run, he is a font of tranquility and strength, a calming influence so powerful that one might hire him to wind down wars.
Noah Wylie in ‘The Pitt.’ (Courtesy of HBO Max)
What both seasons have in common is the sense that their plotlines have been ripped from the “Policy” section of . Among Season 1’s medical …
HBO’s excellent medical propaganda
This deserves loud pushback.
In last week’s episode of The Pitt, an unhoused neurodivergent sex worker received physician-assisted suicide courtesy of Obamacare. And they say television has lost its values.
All right, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. Now in the middle of its second season, HBO Max’s Emmy-winning hospital drama is to progressives what Fox’s “War on Terror” white-knuckler 24 used to be to the Right: entertainment that scratched us exactly where we itched. In The Pitt’s enlightened universe, doctors are not just trustworthy but saintly, ever ready to intercede for you and me. Every failure is “systemic,” and few problems exist that can’t be solved with more and better government cheese. If In Treatment, HBO’s late-aughts psychotherapeutic procedural, made a certain kind of viewer yearn for the psychiatrist’s couch, expect The Pitt to do the same for the emergency room. No, we don’t really want to spend an afternoon in the care of Noah Wyle’s arch-compassionate team. On the other hand, maybe we actually kind of do?
Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending physician at an overcrowded Pittsburgh hospital. Along with his staff of residents, med students, and nurses, Robby patches up the Steel City’s working poor with an almost Mother Teresan goodheartedness and skill. In Season 1, confronted with overdoses, drownings, and a host of other crises great and small, the team nevertheless found time to deliver the soapiness that the best medical series have always brought. Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif), then a second-year resident, spent the show’s opening hours in an ankle monitor, having assaulted her louche ex-husband’s latest squeeze. Dr. Heather Collins (Tracey Ifeachor), a more senior MD, had a miscarriage mid-shift. Need I even add that she continued to work?
Season 2’s prevailing tone is at once more serious and less sorrowful. Mostly gone are the staff’s personal foibles and follies, but vanished, too, is the post-COVID-19 despair that hung over the inaugural episodes like an aerosol haze. When viewers first met Robby, the man was a nervous wreck, lost in inescapable memories of the ER’s plague years. In the latest run, he is a font of tranquility and strength, a calming influence so powerful that one might hire him to wind down wars.
Noah Wylie in ‘The Pitt.’ (Courtesy of HBO Max)
What both seasons have in common is the sense that their plotlines have been ripped from the “Policy” section of . Among Season 1’s medical …
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