TV shows are not naturally occurring, they're the product of many people's hard work. TV shows might strive for realism but that does not mean they are real. They're created by people. At its core, a TV show is a story. Stories don't write themselves. They're the brainchild of one or more people. Those people have biases and those biases show up on screen.
Stories are meant to be engaged with. Some stories have moral lessons, some are meant to teach us stuff but not all stories have a moral lesson at the end. You accept the premise of the story then engage with the elements of the story on the story's terms and come to your own conclusions of what the story is trying to say and if it says it well.
We're not meant to uncritically absorb what the author is trying to say or the story they think they're telling. Because as I said in the beginning, people have biases (conscious or not) that colour the way they view the world. Writers and readers (or watchers) are in conversation with one another.
The storyteller is not my teacher and and I do not expect them to be. What I expect is for the storyteller to treat me some measure of respect as I work through their story. I cannot remember who said that no two persons ever read the same book, but it's always relevant to remember.
If elements of a story must be erased for your analysis to work then frankly, your analysis is not worth the paper it's printed on. You cannot say, âIgnore that this character is a brown woman and that the man belittling her is her white boss. Ignore that he treats her white junior better than her.â because White Boss is suffering.
Somebody made a choice to make the character being belittled and berated a woman of colour and the character being coddled and indulged a white man. Somebody made the choice to have the resident he has a romantic relationship with Black. Somebody made the choice to have the Black resident he has a romantic relationship disappear. And those choices matter. If the storytellers (especially on TV) did not want us to engage with the race and genders of the characters, they could have cast the characters in such a way that these concerns would not be relevant.
Casting characters of colour on a ârealisticâ TV show about a field so rife with racism that one can draw a straight line from multiple modern advancements to enslaved and tortured Black and brown people then pretending that their race and/or gender does not affect how they interact with that world is naĂŻve at best.
The people behind the Pitt have spoken endlessly about how realism is their primary concern. It's hard not to notice that their realism only goes so far as acknowledging and (in my opinion) over explaining White Boss and his pain. The women, especially the women of colour, who he belittles, bullies, and abuses are of very little interest to the storytellers. Their pain is insignificant in the face of White Bossâs boulder. They (and their pain) only exist so far as they can give White Boss complexity.
And that too is a choice.
Toni Morrison once said, âthe world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion.â
And even if we decide to agree with the storytellers that White Bossâs sexism and racism does not come from a malicious place but a deeply held belief in the mostly women of colour's ability to be ârockstarsâ, we cannot pretend that the people who are writing this show do have biases that show up in screen. They might not have intended to write a story about a white man grinding down his brown female subordinate until she leaves the field. But that is what they wrote. So we have to ask ourselves, does what the writers intended matter when that's not what we got in the end?
In my opinion, it does not.
