“The Pitt”: How Corny Can Crisis Get?

“We are failing young men,” Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) waxes poetic, “because we don’t teach them how to express their emotions.” It is a late-first-season episode of HBO’s The Pitt, and Robinavitch is advising a patient (Joanna Going) to file an involuntary psychiatric hold on her troubled son (Jackson Kelly). “We just tell them to man up,” he continues, “and then we let them get their lessons in manhood from toxic podcasts. These young men then feel isolated from themselves and society, and they find community and comfort in all the wrong places.” Wyle’s speech, of course, is meant to be timely; the show intends here to evoke a whole sphere of social crisis in this immanent medical encounter. But it’s a jarring moment in a show that, by my count, mentions alpha male podcasts on zero other occasions.