Since the beginning of the medical drama genre, shows have all followed a singular formula: high-stakes emergencies, hot doctors and extraordinarily peculiar medical cases all before the closing credits. From long-running hospital sagas to fast-paced ER thrillers, the genre has rarely lacked intensity or emotional appeal. 

But in a crowded field of shows built on spectacle and big twists, “The Pitt” has quickly distinguished itself through something far rarer in medical dramas — a plea for empathy, which is needed more than ever.  

Debuting in 2025, “The Pitt” is HBO’s critically acclaimed medical drama that chronicles life in a busy, high-pressure ER in Pittsburgh. With an almost four-month run, season two wrapped up last Thursday with the release of the season finale. Each season has 15 episodes, each of which covers an hour within a single day while incorporating current-day events and issues into its plotlines. 

In fact, this season integrated commentary regarding artificial intelligence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Medicare cuts and a whole lot more. With this season’s shift taking place on the Fourth of July, “The Pitt” forced me to use the show as a looking glass into our nation, one that is arguably in turmoil.

Over the course of two seasons, “The Pitt” depicts stories of patients whose struggles are not just of the medical kind, but also the systemic ones that are following them in from the outside world in a post-2024 U.S. election world, like racism, sex trafficking, abortion, drug addiction, mass shootings, homelessness and the continual impact of COVID-19.

The most politically charged storyline of the show occurs in Season 2, Episode 11, in which ICE agents bring a detained patient into the Pittsburgh emergency room, causing significant disruption, fear among staff and patients and the arrest of a nurse.

Moreover, one of Season 2’s long-running storylines is a direct criticism of the Medicaid cuts resulting from President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and the medical debt crisis. Patient Orlando Diaz comes to the ER unconscious, suffering from a life-threatening complication of diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by severe insulin deficiency. Once the staff stabilizes him, Diaz admits that he has been taking only half of his prescribed insulin dose since losing his Medicaid coverage. 

Diaz needs to stay in the hospital for 48 hours until his condition stabilizes, but because of our country’s infamous and expensive healthcare costs, the bill would come up to $20,000. Diaz then leaves against medical advice. With patients being caught in between insurers, pharmaceutical companies and corporate interests, Diaz’s story is a mind-numbing reality for the more than 100 million Americans carrying medical debt.

The show even draws light to America’s rising fentanyl crisis in season one through patient Nick Bradley. The teenager bought laced Xanax from friends in his study group, resulting in a fentanyl overdose and brain death. His mom says that Nick was the quietest baby, sleeping through the night. If any of his friends had a problem, he was always there to listen and lend a helping hand, and that he would have been a great man. Instead, Nick was one of the over 70,000 annual deaths from fentanyl that occur every year— the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-45.

And there are dozens more true stories just like this in the show that I cannot even begin to describe. When I sit down on my couch every Thursday, these are the kinds of stories that force me to pause and slow down. I have memorized many of the statistics on fentanyl overdoses; I have read about the Black female mortality rate in our healthcare system; I have watched the word Medicaid pop up on the news in what feels like every single day now.

What disappears in these discussions are the people that actually live inside of these numbers and news updates — the patients deciding whether they can afford insulin, the families sitting beside hospital beds, the doctors forced to practice medicine inside a broken system.

To watch it come to my screen in front of me, and feel all the tension, the strife and the unimaginable pain these patients and families feel is sobering. For every patient that shows up in “The Pitt”, there are millions more just like them in our country, and that is exactly what needs to be taken away from the show. 

Storytelling affirms the experiences of some viewers while teaching others about realities they might have never known even existed. Empathy is not simply a feeling. It is a skill. It requires a willingness to imagine the circumstances, fears and motivations that shape another person, which is no easy feat. “The Pitt” does exactly that by making us sit with the discomfort of these realities instead of looking away.

I believe this is why the show resonates so strongly for so many and has been such a success. The ER becomes a microcosm of the nation itself, where immigrant policy, economic inequality, addiction and political decisions all collide at once. Every stretcher coming in carries a person with not just a medical condition, but a story shaped by the world beyond the hospital. 

Stories like these matter so much right now, and they are what we need more of. These narratives remind audiences that progressive ideals emerge from real problems affecting real people. The ER in “The Pitt” becomes a space where those systemic failures are visible, and where the moral urgency of addressing them becomes impossible to ignore.

We are in a moment when the country often feels fractured, and stories that center empathy may be one of the few ways to rebuild a sense of shared responsibility to make this country better. If anything is going to move us toward solutions rooted in compassion, equity and care, it will be stories like these — ones that force us to see each other clearly again.  

Gurneer is a sophomore in LAS.

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