The Pitt is an award-winning series on cable about daily life in an emergency room in Pittsburgh. Each episode represents the traumas and rhythm of one hour in one day. It’s gripping and sometimes so gory in its realism that I divert my eyes.

Two articles recently gave the program the highest praise. One, which appeared in Fortune, said that The Pitt exemplifies DEI in action and demonstrates how it saves lives. Patients in extremis often need someone who looks like them to communicate candidly.

But race, color, ethnicity, gender are beside the point. What matters most is saving lives, expressing empathy for people who are in pain and often terrified.

The cast is white, Black, Indian, Hispanic, Filipino, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, male, female, and even includes a staff member in a wheelchair. It is the quintessence of DEI, and none of it is frivolous. It’s just who they are: trained doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers: people who have chosen to work in a high-pressure emergency room.

The article in Fortune by Robert Raben reminds us of why DEI is valuable.

As diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are under relentless attack, HBO’s medical drama The Pitt offers a masterclass in what DEI truly looks like when these values are woven into the fabric of an institution and put into practice. And how DEI benefits all of us.

There is nothing artificial about “The Pitt.” It is a gripping drama of everyday life in an urban emergency room.

Frank Bruni writes in The New York Times that The Pitt is the most patriotic show on television.

“It’s an empathy exam. It’s a civics lesson. Above all, it’s a study of people under intense pressure — as they are when a pulse is fading, or when a nation is fraying — and the importance of muddling through and making things better, no matter the odds, no matter the obstacles…”

It makes an argument for diversity that’s smart and true, looking beyond the usual dividing lines — race, religion, gender — to less politically charged differences. A brand-new doctor who grew up on a farm in rural America draws on a sensibility that peers lack. A medical student suggests a way to lessen an uninsured patient’s financial distress that her co-workers didn’t think of. It occurred to her not because she’s Asian American but because she grew up in a family with limited means and daunting medical bills, so she was schooled in impediments and options…

There’s a war in America between erudition and improvisation, science and superstition, head and heart. The Pitt might be expected to come down unconditionally on the side of expertise. But it doesn’t, not exactly. While it routinely and rightly exalts medicine’s wondrous advances, it also suggests that experts can be hidebound, timid. And it understands that the wiring of people and of societies demands room for both proper procedure and imagination. 

One of the great things about The Pitt is that the executive producer–Dr. Joe Sachs– is an emergency room doctor who also has a degree in cinema. Every episode is overseen by medical specialists and expert nurses. Every word, every procedure is medically accurate.