On Sept. 14, the second season of “The Pitt” proved its merit at the 2026 Emmys with a total of six wins, including Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, which its first season had already won in 2025. A gritty, real-time medical drama, the series is praised by critics and audiences alike for its unflinchingly realistic portrayal of emergency medicine. Audiences do not watch “The Pitt” for fantastical escapism. They watch for the thrill of grounded accuracy.
They are not the only ones.
Over the past five years, there has been a surge of cultural interest surrounding specialized expertise. Audiences are not just seeking out niche knowledge in their films and TV shows, but in podcasts, YouTube reaction channels, and social media influencers. Content creators like Dr. Mike, Legal Eagle, Corridor Crew, Cinema Therapy, Nurse John, The Behavioral Arts and hundreds of others have exploded over the past decade. When looking at the trend as a whole, it does not seem to matter what specialty is being presented. Audiences are hungry for competent and charismatic people who shine a light on detailed and complicated topics. We are, in this cultural moment, obsessed with friendly experts.
And so I ask myself… why?
To find the answer, I believe we must first go back to 2016. During the divisive American presidential election, a Gallup Poll reported an all-time low in public trust of media as a whole, with only 32% considering it “fairly trustworthy.” Fake news and political mistrust had the American public learning to second-guess everything that was presented to them. After a brief rise in trust, those numbers tanked again during the political divides of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as of last October, they had reached a new record low of 28%.
If there is one thing we are sure of in America, it is that media companies have agendas. People with agendas are not to be trusted. And, as a result, even the most qualified talk show guests are caught in the mistrust crossfire.
So if we do not trust the voices being broadcast to us, who do we trust? According to a 2022 Edelman survey, Gen Z’s overwhelming answer is the real people in their lives, with 88% trusting the judgment of family and 84% trusting friends.
To those of us living in America, none of these numbers are surprising. We have experienced the same trends in our own families, workplaces and social circles. The people we trust most are the genuine, everyday Joes with nothing to sell us, yet when it comes to important but complicated decision-making, many of those people have no more experience or insight than we do.
Enter: expert content creators.
In a way, these influential men and women are some of the only voices our cultural moment allows us to still consider trusting. They have the experience of their careers, yet are not funded by the corporations we distrust. Their message is able to reach us through their platforms, but they joke and interact like the friend we might talk about the same thing with over dinner. Even with creators of fictional shows like “The Pitt,” their down-to-earth recounting of research and experts on set put them, in our eyes, in the exact same truth-craving position that we find ourselves in. They are not just experts in media to us; they are grounded, experienced advisors.
I almost do not want to write the warning that ought to come with that. As someone who loves to learn from voices like these, I want nothing more than to sit back, say that every expert sharing their knowledge is doing it solely out of a desire to spread truth in the world, and leave it at that. But life is not that simple. Inevitably, the people taking advantage of this cultural moment are still people. Some have pure motivations; some do not. Some care about the well-being of the people they are reaching, and some want nothing but ad money. Being charismatic is not the same as being careful, and we cannot forget that, in the end, the effects of their influence on us will be on our own hands.
Still, I cannot end without taking in the beauty of this moment. We have been taught not to trust, not to seek wise counsel, and yet we cannot quell the swelling curiosity that leaves us hungry to understand the world. We are meant to learn. We are meant to grow. And even when the process of how we go about that is messy, we do not stop trying.
And that is more wonderful than a million Emmys.
