Within minutes of starting his emergency room shift at 7 a.m. on July 4, chief attending physician Michael “Dr. Robby” Robinavich has already solved a crisis.
It’s a minor one — a panicked former waitress is sure she’s dying, even though all her tests have come back negative. The exiting night attending, John Shen, promises they’ll give her a shot to keep her alive, maybe 500 “mics” of cyanocobalamin?
“In her condition, I’d push 1,000,” Dr. Robby says, to which Shen lets out an impressed gasp.
The patient calms down. The two men go into the hall and we learn, as we’ve suspected, that they’re just being kind to a hypochondriac: Cyanocobalamin is a fancy name for vitamin B12.
The second season of “The Pitt,” which just started airing Thursdays on HBO Max, moves at the same breakneck pace as its smash first season. And yet there is something comforting about spending time with the very smart, well-intentioned people at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center as they solve problems and dodge an array of bodily fluids while trying to keep desperate people alive and just get to the end of the day.
Mention the concept of “competency porn” (a.k.a. “competence porn”) to anyone you know and there’s a chance they’ll exclaim, “I just found out that’s my favorite genre!” It happened to me four times while writing this essay. “The Pitt” is perhaps the purest example — entertainment that evokes the orgiastic pleasure of watching good people do their jobs well, enhanced by creators who care deeply about telling their stories with the best cinematic tools available.
It’s both time-honored (think: every procedural ever) and on the rise. As we try to make sense of the news around us — a fatal ICE shooting, a rewriting of the history of the Jan. 6 attack, the seizure of the Venezuelan president — our idea of what qualifies as escapism shifts. “Game of Thrones” debuted amid the 2011 recovery from the Great Recession and became appointment television at a time when many Americans enjoyed a stretch of relative peace. “The Pitt” debuted just 11 days before the start of Donald Trump’s second term, and its second season started almost exactly a full year into the administration. Its wild popularity and its many Emmys (including for best drama) cannot be separated from the context in which we’re watching it.
When the news is chaos, we find succor in watching capable people solve complex problems. Here are six signs you’re watching competency porn.
You find yourself admiring unlikable characters
Not everyone on “The Pitt” is a saint. Second-year resident Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) is arrogant, meddling and impulsive — frankly, a jerk — but she’s dedicated and thrives under pressure. Young med student Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) is judgmental and constantly saying the wrong, insensitive thing, exposing her inexperience and sheltered upbringing as a prodigy, but she’s willing to be humbled and learn. You’d be lucky to have them in your corner.
On Netflix’s “The Diplomat,” set in the high-stakes milieu of geopolitics, Keri Russell’s incredibly sharp Kate Wyler is the person everyone knows should be in charge of everything. But she can’t be bothered to change her clothes or brush her hair, and in the third season is passed over for vice president and put in the position of cleaning up the messes of the flashier narcissists surrounding her, like her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) and President Grace Penn (Allison Janney). As viewers, we all want better for Kate, whose weakness is being drawn like a moth to the flame of others’ (chiefly, Hal’s) brilliance. The pleasure comes from watching these flawed characters play with global affairs like chess pieces, while continually being drawn further into a web of cover-ups and constantly slipping into the same dumb patterns.
HBO’s “Industry,” which just premiered its fourth season, is a rare example of a show about young Machiavellian hotshots that has gotten more compelling as the characters mature. Yes, there’s still endless sex and drugs, but the new season excels by refocusing on Harper Stern (Myha’la), who’s found a way to channel her impulses for high risk-taking and shooting from the hip, with hundreds of millions of pounds at stake, into a cause she can believe in: shorting companies that are defrauding investors.
You feel reassured by the adults in the room
ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” (now in its fifth season) lets viewers bask in the company of teachers who care a lot and are beloved by their students. The comedy comes from watching these public servants navigate each new disaster brought on by minuscule budgets, district bureaucracy or their own fragile egos, but there’s always a sense that they’re doing the absolute best for these kids under the circumstances. The same goes for the therapists who make a lot of mistakes, but who always go above and beyond to help their patients and one another on Apple TV’s “Shrinking” (back for Season 3 on Jan. 28). These shows take a page from “Parks and Recreation,” which hit its stride in its second season because it stopped making fun of its characters a la “The Office,” and instead focused on their optimism and sincere efforts, even if those usually went awry.
As the 12th (!) Star Trek series, the newest edition, “Starfleet Academy” (coming to Paramount+ on Thursday) is likewise about the universes’s brightest minds overcoming their differences to fight for an optimistic future, and it welcomes a new class of cadets into a training facility located in (of all places) San Francisco. With Holly Hunter as their unorthodox, often barefoot chancellor, we never doubt that these hotheaded adolescents with raging hormones have a steady guiding hand.
You implicitly trust the actors
“The Pitt” is anchored by Noah Wyle, who made his name playing the excellent John Carter on “ER” — the second-longest-running prime-time medical drama of all time (behind “Grey’s Anatomy”) — and became a strident advocate for health care reform. For 1994 to 2005, he was at the center of a show that people across the country tuned into weekly as a collective ritual, in an age before the iPhone was invented. His very presence in an emergency room, even as a different character, conveys calm. No matter how bad things get, if he’s around, we know that we, the viewers, and the fictional patients are in the best hands possible. He’s earned that trust.
Apple TV’s “Hijack” operates off the same principle, taking a great, consistent actor who’s never let us down, Idris Elba, and putting him at the center of a crisis. In the first season, he’s a specialist in hostile corporate negotiations who just happens to be on a hijacked plane. In the show’s second season (which starts streaming Wednesday), he’s taking on terrorists on a train. The second you see his face, you know things are going to work out, and can just sit back and enjoy how his razor-sharp mind solves problem after problem. Chaos may reign, but everyone would be worse off if he weren’t there.
That Kathryn Bigelow also cast Elba as the fictional president in Netflix’s “A House of Dynamite” further speaks to how much he instantly reads as an authority figure, like Kiefer Sutherland in “24” and “Designated Survivor.”
You expect the cast to save the day (even when they don’t)
Speaking of “A House of Dynamite,” there’s been fierce debate over whether the movie, in which government officials trying their hardest to respond to an unprovoked, unidentified nuclear attack, counts as a demonstration of competence — or its exact opposite. I’m firmly on the “Hell yeah!” side. Even if the chilling conclusion is that we’re screwed, even if the people involved make mistakes, everyone is enormously capable and doing their best with the tools available.
Kathryn Bigelow’s doom and gloom scenario is 2025’s second-best example of competency porn precisely because it doesn’t bother with good guys versus bad guys. It’s about pointing out the holes in the system that even America’s best minds can’t fix before it’s too late.
Competent people dealing with systematic failures is the essence of the problems-in-space genre that fuels every Andy Weir movie, from “The Martian” to the hotly anticipated “Project Hail Mary” (in theaters March 20), which stars Ryan Gosling as a middle school teacher on a suicide mission to save the Earth from a giant formation of alien microbes that threatens to block the sun and start a new ice age. Like “Apollo 13,” “Hidden Figures” and “Gravity,” it’s a movie about very intelligent humans using proficiency, education and (usually) teamwork for extraordinary undertakings.
You’re impressed by the villains’ work ethic
Look no further than the new Apple TV hit “Pluribus” for evidence of how deliciously chilling competence can be. Vince Gilligan’s latest series is a showcase of beautiful, choreographed human labor. An alien virus has overtaken the world and rid all but 13 people of free thought, which means long, satisfying sequences of the hive mind restocking a grocery store or harvesting dead bodies, in contrast to the halting, imperfect actions of Carol (Rhea Seehorn), who’s holding on to her independent mind with all her might. But to what end?
Gilligan’s work has long highlighted the pleasures of watching a character meticulously accomplish a task, even if that task is criminal scheming. Think Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) quest to make 99.1 percent pure meth on “Breaking Bad,” or the long sequences of Mike (Jonathan Banks) performing seemingly mundane tasks for his dubious dealings on “Better Call Saul.”
You’re rooting for people based on their skills
Only a narrow slice of reality TV fits the competency-porn bill. Shows that thrive on conflict like, well, everything on Bravo, are out, as are competition shows that involve Gordon Ramsay yelling at people. “The Great British Baking Show” is perhaps the purest entry from unscripted television. It’s just a showcase of nice, skilled people who want to do a good job making concoctions out of sugar and flour, for the grand prize of being told they’ve done bang-up work.
In its new era, “Survivor” has become a show far less about the hardships of living outdoors than it is about excelling at strategy and manipulation. Everyone on the show is now a student of the game. When the 50th all-stars season starts airing on Feb. 27, the joy will be in seeing people who have all become incredibly good at this one very niche thing face off against one another.
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