Why, oh why, can’t they just make a show that’s fun? Why, oh why, do they have to take something that’s otherwise cool and interesting and turn it into an exhausting moral lecture by naggy schoolmarms of the kind who force their third graders to celebrate Kwanzaa? The audience can only take so much, and it’s not going to take much more. Hollywood is dying, and its cause of death is suicide.
I’m a big fan of about 80 percent of HBO’s newish show “The Pitt.” It’s about an urban emergency room in Pittsburgh, and when they’re doing medical stuff, it’s fantastic. People come in with compound fractures, spurting arteries, and dislocated arms, and it’s fascinating. It’s pretty horrifying, too, at times. There are lots of people mutilated in various ways, and I’m telling you, the scene where they demonstrated what happens when you go to your doctor after it lasts more than four hours is a more potent warning than any of those Viagra ad disclaimers.
The treatment involves a syringe. Yikes.
The medical stuff is great. It’s exciting. It’s interesting. You learn stuff. There are lots of people yelling “Stat!” and “10 cc’s” and using all sorts of cool jargon. The actors are all talented, from the stars to the guests. The writing is usually sharp. There’s a little bit of personal backstory to some of the doctors, but not that much, and you can just kind of skip over that because it’s not that important. You come to “The Pitt” for the trauma, not the drama. And if that was all there was, this would be a top-flight, 10-out-of-10 show.
But Hollywood is utterly incapable of taking “Yes” for an answer. As I said, 80 percent of the show is fantastic. And then there’s the 20 percent that’s woke and lazy.
And when I say, “woke and lazy,” I mean that they offer up the most basic, unanalyzed, hack cliché kind of tiresome woke you can imagine, earnest and sincere and utterly banal. It’s the kind of woke where they assume you agree with them, and they never analyze or challenge any of it. They received this wisdom, and they accept it as true. The people who created this show live in a world where they can’t imagine that anybody who matters thinks any differently. They certainly haven’t met anyone who thinks any differently. They assume that anyone who does is a bad person.
They also assume their favorite categories of people are wonderful. Being a downtown emergency room, there are homeless people. But they don’t get called “homeless,” much less what they really are, which is bums, derelicts, and hobos. No, these urban angels are “the unhoused,” a delightful term that implies their lack of shelter simply happened to them out of the blue through no agency of their own, such as being a dope fiend, or because society has become so mentally and morally weak that it won’t put the insane in asylums where they belong. The show doesn’t spare the graphic reality of living on the street, from sores to filth, but it treats the homeless themselves as generic victims of society. Now, in some cases, that’s true, like the aforementioned lunatics, whom we refused to force into care because we don’t want to interfere with the rights of somebody who spends his days yelling at dragons on street corners. But, in other cases, they are drug addicts or drunks, and that’s ultimately on them. The doctors and nurses treat them with compassion, as they should, but as we will see, that compassion does not extend to everybody. For instance, it would not extend to you.
If some dude comes in pretending to be a chick, everyone is very, very careful to make sure to use the right pronoun. If you want interesting drama, you might have a dude pretending to be a chick come in with a prostate problem. How would that work? That’s interesting. No, you’re not going to get that because that might raise uncomfortable questions, as well as uncomfortable vibes among the male audience. Instead, it’s a lot of “Isn’t she brave and wonderful?” because if you’re a transsexual, you’ve got to be brave and wonderful.
This is also true if you are an illegal alien. A couple of weeks ago, they had their infamous ICE episode where two faceless — they were masked — and hulking ICE agents brought in this illegal alien woman who hurt herself running away. The implication is that they hurt her, but whatever. Of course, she’s practically a Madonna, just a wonderful lady from Central America who’s here working hard and contributing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She is apparently doing this, contributing as she gets free medical care from the country she broke into, but “The Pitt” is not going to talk about that. You’re not going to get any complexity, such as if it were a male sex offender, like so many illegal aliens are. That would interfere with the message. Of course, the presence of the ICE agent drives away a bunch of people from the emergency room and a bunch of nurses on the staff, which sends a message the producers probably didn’t intend. After the heroic head doctor yells at the ICE agents for enforcing the democratically enacted laws passed by our Congress and signed by our president, they attempt to take her away before she gets her arm in a sling, and she starts screaming, and then a male nurse jumps in to fight the ICE guys, who kick his butt and arrest him. Of course, there’s zero chance the cops are going to let the doctors do whatever treatment they want because they all understand how bureaucracy works, but we need to see them as bad people because they’re obviously bad because of their badness. And the illegal alien is obviously good because, of course, she’s good.
And then there’s the guy with no health insurance, and then there’s a lot of talk about how the healthcare system is broken, but there’s one word you never hear uttered: Obamacare. Every single person associated with this show voted for Obama. Every single one of them, except for the young actress who plays the child prodigy (when someone calls her an “idiot savant,” she hops, “We don’t use that term anymore.” Ugh.), and she would’ve voted for him if she could’ve voted then. So, this terrible system that they’re indicting is the system they wanted, but no, the real problem is not getting more money from people who are actually working and supposed to be here to pay for people who aren’t. Whatever.
But don’t worry, there is a villain in “The Pitt.” It’s the white guy who has a job. Last season, there was a white guy who had a job who was annoyed having to wait endlessly in the crowded waiting room to see a doctor and eventually punched a nurse. Can you imagine his entitlement? Of course, the problem is, he is entitled. He actually works for a living, and he’s supposed to be in America. Should he be a little annoyed that people who aren’t paying for their stuff and shouldn’t be in this country get in ahead of him? Yes. But in typical working white guy fashion, he punches somebody. Yeah, the big threat of violence in the inner city is middle-aged white guys with jobs. You see one of those, and you'd better cross the street.
Another white guy was the security guard who tased a black student who had a schizophrenic freak out. You see, you’re supposed to let yourself be beaten to a pulp by a schizophrenic black guy if you’re a white guy. Or something.
And then this season, there’s a white guy who’s playing golf, and he drinks too much and has a little cocaine and freaks out and grabs a nurse, and boy, is everybody mad at him. They should be mad at him, but they wouldn’t be mad at anybody else. The kind of understanding that they would give to any junkie or bum who spazzes out in the emergency room is completely absent. While their actions can’t be held against them for reasons, the white guy’s chimping out while intoxicated is more proof of his inherent madness. After all, he’s a white guy with a job.
It’s like “Law & Order: ER” – it wasn’t a gangbanger with a beef who shot up the kids breakdancing to save the community center. It was the Christian businessman in the Mercedes with a Trump sticker who wanted to turn it into condos. You know, just like in real life.
It is also tiresome and annoying. And it’s so lame. They throw these little sermons into the mix without ever questioning or challenging their premises, without grappling with any of the moral complexity of real life, presuming to teach us their dogma, even though their dogma has proven ridiculous. Perhaps they think they’re just trying to educate us so we won’t go out and punch another nurse.
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