Hollywood Woke Moralizing Is the Pits |
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........