DOGE vs “The Pitt”

Mother Jones illustration; Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty; Warner Bros. Discovery

I think The Pitt is the best television show I’ve ever seen. That’s perhaps not quite the paean that it appears—I mostly use the TV to watch sports, and there have been long periods when, following overlong exposure, I haven’t watched it at all. But this winter I’ve been camped out with my wife at 8:59 on Thursdays, waiting impatiently for Max to upload the next episode of the medical drama set in the emergency room of a Pittsburgh teaching hospital. (The first 12 episodes are now available; the penultimate show airs this Thursday.) One reason for our dedication is that the show’s truly compelling—never-a-false-note dialogue, casting that makes it clear what magic can happen when handsomeness is not your only priority, and a cinematography so immersive that half the time I forget I’m not watching a documentary. But the other reason is, it provides the perfect counterpoint to the first few months of the second Trump reign. Without having been able to anticipate its context, and without ever making an overtly political point, The Pitt is making the strongest possible argument against our new way of doing things.

Some of that riposte is obvious—the show is set in a teaching hospital, one of the institutions being hit hardest by Elon Musk’s cuts. It shows people working smoothly and efficiently despite the chaos that surrounds them, a professionalism that’s clearly been made possible by decades, and centuries, of medical research about how to save lives, of incrementally building on what came before—a precise chain of improvement and education that will be broken by the random and rapid cuts now underway. Noah Wyle, who stars as Dr. Robby, the senior attending physician in the emergency room, flashes back regularly to his mentor, an older doctor who died during Covid; he is a mentor in turn to a group of residents, interns, and med students, taking the task of teaching almost as seriously as treating patients. Because, in the long run, those are the same thing: the passing down of human knowledge, always with an eye toward improvement.

But not to our new DOGE overlords. Johns Hopkins University, among our greatest medical institutions, announced 2,200 staff cuts this winter after Trump pulled $800 million in funding; Baylor, Emory, and Stanford all reported hiring freezes or other such adjustments; the ongoing attacks on Columbia’s funding may derail, among other things, a 30-year-research project on diabetes prevention. The doctors of The Pitt are already stretched thin, with an overflowing waiting room; an administrator appears in the first episode to request that they somehow improve “patient satisfaction scores,” which sounds like the kind of demand Musk’s acolytes would make (“by close of business Friday”). But improvement of any kind can’t happen without resources; clearly what’s in store for big-city ERs under the Trump administration is decay, perhaps quite rapid. (And no, AI is not going to insert your breathing tube.) And that doesn’t even get us to Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his eccentric prejudices about medicine; he’s just cancelled the meeting of the advisory panel that recommends next year’s flu vaccines, which clearly seems like a plot twist setting up season 2 of The Pitt.

The cool competence on display in the ER is only part of the story, though. It also contains a powerful if unstated argument for inclusion. Since this is big-city America, racial diversity among patients and doctors is almost taken for granted; several of Dr. Robby’s top lieutenants are Black; a couple of the Filipina nurses chat away in (subtitled) Tagalog. The closest the show comes to acknowledging that this wasn’t always so comes when a patient arrives on a gurney possessing too much medical knowledge. It turns out that as a young man he’d worked in the Freedom House volunteer ambulance corps, an all-Black precursor to professionalized EMT services which was eventually shut down by pandering politicians. The medical staff all pay him real respect; it’s kind of the opposite of taking down Jackie Robinson’s picture from the Pentagon website.

The most powerful portrait of the importance of diversity in The Pitt, however, is provided by Dr. Melissa King, played by Taylor Dearden. Mel is somewhere on some spectrum, owning a collection of quiet tics that cause her to occasionally secret herself in the stairwell to soothe herself with an iPhone video of a lava lamp. And yet she’s clearly coming into her own as a doctor, in no small part because of her ability to connect with people no one else can reach. “You’re a sensitive person,” her supervising doctor tells her at one point. “This is a tough place for sensitive people. But we need them. Badly.” I pity the Emmy voter who has to choose between her and head nurse Dana Evans, played by Katherine LaNasa, for best supporting actress. And I pity the Silicon Valley “meritocrat” who thinks MCAT scores alone determine who will best save lives.

In the end, what makes this show the ultimate foil for our political moment is its moral seriousness. People die in emergency rooms, plenty of them. And this show doesn’t flinch from that, ever. Each has been gutting; in some ways, though, the hardest death was of an old man who went pretty peacefully, but whose daughter couldn’t come to terms with his passing. It took a couple of hours of just-stern-enough guidance from Dr. Robby to get her through it. He was never sentimental or over-earnest; the show accepted that tragedy comes, but that it’s still tragedy. I’ve never seen a screen death that reminded me so powerfully of deaths I’ve actually witnessed. The world is a serious place, which is part of its beauty.

Except, if you’re Donald Trump or Elon Musk. The first has lived without consequences for so long that he doesn’t inhabit the same realm of cause-and-effect as the rest of us; the second is too rich to live in the real world, but actually his problem goes much deeper than that. His bizarre contention earlier this year that empathy was the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization” is perhaps easier to understand when you remember that he has strenuously insisted that we live in a computer “simulation.” (There’s only a “one-in-a-billion” chance that we live in a “base reality,” he’s said.) If you are just a character in a computer game, then the kind of vandalism he’s spent the winter indulging in—firing people, wrecking lives, tearing up whole chapters of scientific history—comes easy. Why not? At worst, it will all get reset someday, by whoever is running the game.

In this season of cruel fantasy come to life, a TV show, of all things, has made the most powerful public argument I’ve seen reality in all its often-desperate beauty.