This presentation examines a significant shift in contemporary medical television: the move away from the heroic individual — the crusading reformer, the tireless emergency physician — toward narratives that situate character within institutional frameworks that resist individual resolution. Drawing on three recent series, The Resident, Transplant, and Brilliant Minds, I argue that post-2020 medical drama increasingly reflects deeper ideological reckonings with the limits of American exceptionalism and the structural conditions of healthcare delivery across different national contexts.
Using Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling and Stuart Hall's theorization of representation and ideology as theoretical anchors, the presentation explores how each series constructs character in ways that reveal culturally specific assumptions about individual agency and systemic constraint. The Resident's corruption-fighting protagonists ultimately reaffirm American cultural investment in personal determination as the solution to institutional failure. Transplant deploys its Syrian refugee physician to expose how immigration status shapes professional opportunity and patient care within Canadian universal healthcare. Brilliant Minds further complicates heroic convention by centering neurodivergent identity, challenging normative constructions of medical authority and institutional belonging.
The presentation argues that these series occupy a productive tension between the audience pleasures of individual heroism and the representational demands of systemic critique — a tension that both mirrors and mediates public anxieties about healthcare reform in an era of ongoing crisis. Implications for media studies, medical humanities, and cultural analysis of post-pandemic television will be discussed.

Authors:
Margaret Tally, State University of New York - Empire State University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Margaret Tally is Full Professor of Social and Public Policy at the School for Graduate Studies of the State University of New York, Empire State College. She is the author of Television Culture and Women’s Lives: Thirtysomething and the Contradictions of Gender(1995). She has also edited three book collections with Betty Kaklamanidou, HBO's Girls: Questions of Gender, Politics, and Millennial Angst(2014), The Millennials on Film and Television: Essays on the Politics of Popular Culture (2014), and Politics and Politicians in Contemporary US Television(2016), The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age(2016) and The Limits of #Metoo in Hollywood: Gender and Power in the Entertainment Industry (2021, McFarland Press).

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