So, like the rest of America, Scott and I have been watching the cultural phenomenon known as THE PITT. We were late to the party and didn’t start season 1 until season 2 was already airing (or tubing, maybe we should say these days, as of course the Internet is a series of you-know-what.) but we were honestly hooked quite quickly and it’s the rare sort of show that leads to me wanting to indulge in a little literary criticism.

(It’s interesting for us, as a household composed of a former first responder and a former hospital admin, to see what the show has elided or what roles it has collapsed in the service of narrative. That said, it’s more accurate than any other hospital drama I have ever seen, and I don’t have a lot of critiques on that level.)

I am very impressed with the show’s pacing and structure, how it sets and interweaves narrative hooks and payoffs over the course of each episode and each season. It rarely takes the cheap, expected, “dramatic” route out, and it is willing to let the viewers and the characters sit with the consequences of their actions. It manages to be competence porn without being a Solve The Unlikely Medical Mystery show or ever making it seem like the protagonists are superheroes who never make a mistake. And it engages with hospital employees and patients alike with empathy and humor.

But what I wanted to talk about is what this show is doing thematically, which I think is a big, big part of why it’s such a touchstone right now. (And why The Bear was a touchstone before it, because both shows are about similar things on a thematic level. But I digress.)

THE PITT is a concretized metaphor, not to put too fine a point on it. It’s a show about a trauma center, and it’s a show that centers on trauma. So much trauma. Vast, cultural, unprocessed trauma that we’ve stuffed down and left unexamined in the USA for the better part of a decade now. (Even longer, in the case of the Forever War.)

This is a show about, in no particular order, processing the trauma of a global pandemic in which millions died, war, poverty, gun violence, drug addiction, personal grief, the crumbling U.S. health care system, and our own daily interpersonal disappointments and failures. All those horrible things that have gotten memory-holed because we just need to move on, get on with our lives, and we don’t want to feel all those terrible things that we would have to feel if we faced what we have collectively been through.

It’s also a show about what makes masculinity toxic or benevolent and how those traits can be embodied in the same person.

These characters are all functional. They’re fine. They are getting their jobs done. The fact that they walk around asking each other “Are you okay?” with the inevitable answer being “I’m fine,” and an arch acknowledgement by both parties of the lie is just more evidence that they’re fine, right?

But they’re not fine. We’re not fine, as a society. We’re actually in pretty rough shape, all things considered, and just dragging ourselves forward to face the next crisis. Blood on the soap dispensers and all over the floor. Running on empty. Trying to catch a breather whenever we can.

THE PITT allows all of these things to be complicated, without presenting easy answers or one-shot catharsis. It acknowledges that coping is not healing, and that healing is a process that is never over. And that the only way out is to give ourselves and those around us a little grace. And maybe to let ourselves feel.

The quote at the top of the page is a piece of good advice given by an attending physician after a very bad day at work. (It wouldn’t be much of a drama if we got the good days: that’s how it goes. So not much of a spoiler there.) “Go home. Cry. It’s just grief leaving the body.”

That capstone piece of advice is sort of the thematic cherry on a season of television that urges us to feel, to deal with our hurt, to accept that it is a part of us now and cannot be pushed out. That we need to face our cultural traumas (pandemic, gun violence, addiction, bigotry, all the terrible legacies), expose them to the light, talk about them, and try to heal them. For the sake of ourselves and each other.

It hurts to look at the wound, and it hurts to treat the wound. But if you don’t, it will fester and kill you.