What Fictional Dramas Can Tell Us About the Post COVID Pandemic Narratives

Is the media being used to salvage medicine’s reputation?

As much as I try, I just can’t leave COVID behind. Andrew Heard writes at the Substack TV’s Moral Philosophy, which is both a great read and has essentially no overlap with Sensible Medicine. This piece had me looking at COVID in a whole new way, through the eyes of the people who create TV and movies.

Adam Cifu

The pandemic dealt a blow to the reputation of the medical community. This was largely due to medicine’s seeming obsession with promoting unproven and unscientific policies. Proclamations that lockdowns work, mask mandates reduce the transmission of COVID, and COVID vaccines stop transmission seemed laughable to anyone living in the real world whose response to the pandemic was not utter panic. Many in the medical community continued to promote these ideas long after ordinary people recognized the truth. This damaged trust in the medical field and that trust has not recovered. Life may have returned to normal but once broken, trust is a very difficult thing to rebuild.

People turned to media narratives over facts and reality during the pandemic. Some embraced pro-mandate narratives while others believed in anti-mandate narratives. The pro-mandate side had slogans like “we're all in this together” as well as “follow the science” and “trust the experts”. It gave people a simple narrative to follow. A narrative that allowed them to label anyone who had any questions or concerns about the measures as “science deniers”, “anti-maskers” and “anti-vax”. These became regular features of traditional news media.

Many in the skeptic community embraced narratives like “no new normal” as well as “the great reset” and “government isn't the solution, it's the problem”. You saw them embrace simplistic narratives that allowed people to use labels like “sheeple”, “NPCs” (non-playable characters) and “fascists”.

The truth was more complicated, but the narratives had to be maintained. It's hard to trust people when you reduce them down to the simplest narrative. Can trust be rebuilt if the narratives are still around? What if those narratives aren't gone, they just change mediums?

Television narratives are powerful, and not just the ones from the traditional media companies which report on the news. The traditional news media has probably lost some of its power to deliver a narrative after its unquestioning promotion of public health officials and medical doctors who spoke in favor of unpopular public health interventions.

Fictional story telling has a way of cutting through such ideas of bias. You can create narratives that don't necessarily rely on facts or accuracy because fiction doesn't have to. We see this in what has been called the CSI effect. Shows like those in the CSI franchise created an expectation among jury members that prosecutors needed airtight forensic evidence, or they would not convict the accused. You could make a similar argument with shows like The West Wing (1999–2006) and Veep (2012–19). There was resurgent popularity of Veep, a comedy about the Vice President of the United States, when Kamala Harris became the Democrat nominee because of narrative overlap.

We may already be experiencing something similar with regards to the medical community and the pandemic. Late 2024 and early 2025 saw the launch of multiple shows featuring doctors: Doctor Odyssey, Brilliant Minds, The Pitt, Watson, and Doc. Doctor Odyssey is about a doctor on a cruise ship who was one of the earliest to catch COVID in his community and has PTSD from his near fatal battle with the disease. The Pitt is about emergency room doctors. The head of the emergency department in The Pitt has PTSD from dealing with patients during COVID. Brilliant Minds is about a doctor with face blindness who empathizes with his patients. He is willing to go as far as taking his patient's medicine to find out its effect. Watson is about a group of doctors who call themselves medical detectives. Doc is based on a real story of a doctor who loses eight years of their memory and tries to deal with the consequences.

Doctor Odyssey has multiple episodes where the main character said some version of “That procedure worked during the pandemic, let's do that”. They also recently had a cruise passenger quarantined for testing COVID positive during an episode. The Pitt had an episode where two patients in the waiting room came to blows over whether one of them should wear a mask. Later, one of the doctors shames the “anti-masker” by giving them a choice over whether doctors should wear masks in the operating room for their procedure. Saying that as doctors they believe in protecting patients.

Hollywood was a big supporter of the medical community during COVID and tried to push the “mainstream public health narratives.” It's hard not to see the new shows as a continuation of the film and television industry’s stance during the pandemic. (This is, of course, an industry which got special exemptions from mandates during the pandemic.)

At the same time, counter narratives are beginning to appear in the media. At the height of vaccine mandates, the soap opera known as General Hospital fired several employees for refusing to get the COVID vaccine. One of these fired actors was then hired by the show Days of Our Lives (he was on the show from 2022-24). A prominent storyline during the actor's time on Days of Our Lives involved three characters getting a potentially deadly disease who were told they needed to get multiple injections of the vaccine because the cure wasn't going to work well. It's hard to see this as anything but a commentary on this actor's situation. The actor, who was fired from General Hospital and joined Days of Our Lives, would eventually return to General Hospital after the mandates were lifted. One of his colleagues could not.

Maybe the most obvious example of a counter narrative is from the dark comedy, Based on a True Story (2023-24). In the second season, a serial killer begins murdering doctors and medical professionals. Yet one of the fictional victims is an actor portraying Dr. Fauci in the “Anthony Fauci Story”. The victim is discovered in his trailer, and he has pictures of the real-life Dr. Anthony Fauci on his walls. You could hardly find a more obvious example of what they're implying with that.

One of the more nuanced counter narratives is the movie Puppy Love (2023). While it doesn't deal directly with the pandemic or mandates, it does deal with the effects of the mandates. The movie is a romantic comedy in which a main character has been traumatized by lockdowns and mandates. He is an ordinary guy who cannot bring himself to go back into the office where he works because he is terrified of being around people. There's a scene where he drives into the office parking lot attempting to go to work, only to turn around and go back home for fear of the people in his office. Getting himself a pet helps him work his way back into the world.

It remains to be seen which narrative will win out in the mind of public opinion. But it seems that there is a goal of creating a more sympathetic portrayal of the medical community. Perhaps this tilt is entirely innocent and appeals to people after the pandemic. However, it's equally possible that those making these shows are doing so with the intention of rehabilitating the reputation of medicine in the wake of falling trust.

Andrew Heard is a philosopher exploring the morals and ethics of narratives in film and television at TV's Moral Philosophy. He is writing a book about the narrative structures of the pandemic to show how they conflict and where they converge.