TV's Wokest Show Bows Out With Pragmatism
Station 19 Didn't Show Us How To Vanquish Injustice, But It Gave Us Ideas To Fight It
There are only two episodes left of the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff Station 19. Though the program probably won't be remembered in the same realm as its mother show, which has been producing new episodes since Pope John Paul II was still alive, the drama about the jobs and personal lives of one Seattle Fire Department firehouse did provide us a roadmap for the turbulent and changing social justice politics in the Donald Trump and Joe Biden eras.
Arriving in 2018 as a mid-season replacement meant to take the place of the Kerry Washington political thriller Scandal in ABC’s Thursday Night Lineup, Station 19 had a rather implausible concept for its time. Its setting is a Seattle firehouse with a diverse staff of firefighters, three women – two of whom are minorities – a black man, a gay biracial man, a bisexual woman, and a Hispanic captain. In the first season, aired during the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency, the firefighters’ conflicts with the Seattle Police, whose racist and brutal tactics turned off many of the firefighters, became a central storyline. While it seemed odd that firefighters - who at least in New York are probably a more conservative demographic than police – would present themselves as bulwarks against over-policing and racial injustice, Station 19 offered a world where the most trusted profession in the country is on the side of the maligned. That collectivist worldview was bred in the camaraderie and brother- and sisterhood shared by the firefighters who call Station 19 home.
Now in its final season, Station 19’s third-to-last episode, “Usher In A New World,” aired this past Thursday. The episode focuses on the firehouse operating its semi-regular walk-in medical clinic, but this time to serve migrants recently bussed to Seattle from Texas. The crew contends with several health problems migrants have suffered trying to get across the Rio Grande, including a young boy with an infected wound caused by razor wire and a woman who suffered a botched surgery that might have left her barren. As it has since it first aired, Station 19 highlighted some of the inhumane treatment of our society’s marginalized groups, from black people to LGBTQ people and even Native Americans, through the lens of the “boys club” politics of firefighter and law enforcement. Typically, the storyline involves a redemption arc for a regressive character or a solution to a problem caused by issues like inequality, corruption, and prejudice. Yet in Thursday’s episode, there was a very different vibe from what I remember in the first few seasons. There were no revolutionary vibes, just a determination toward making things a little less bad.
In the episode, Joey (Noah Alexander Gerry), the foster son of Station 19 firefighter Ben Warren (Jason George), and his wife, Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) – one of the main characters on Grey’s Anatomy – comes to help at the pop-up clinic. He had recently dropped out of Medical School because he became dispirited with it and the society around him. When he explains his reasoning to Ben, his argument is so defeatest and apocalyptic that it almost felt like a parody of Zoomer cynicism. “The world is on fire,” he repeated several times. It becomes increasingly clear that he also feels guilty about the privilege he has and is angry others don’t feel the same about theirs.
What struck me though is that this viewpoint, while exaggerated, was common among the main cast themselves in the early seasons. During the episode, Joey butts heads with Ben and other firefighters, including the the show’s main character, Andy Herrera (Jaina Lee Ortiz). While not fully justifying or embracing his toxic cynicism – in fact, both are openly hostile to it – they do partially validate it but encourage him to thrive and use his successes to do good. While great advice, it was notable how different their attitudes were from the revolutionary-style talk we got from the same people in the first few seasons.
The show’s evolution from a hopeful, albeit borderline delusional, representation of “what could be,” to a more realistic portrayal of “what is” is fittingly parallel to the path of the left-of-center social justice warriors in the timeframe the show has existed. Early on, every racist or bigot has some sort of “come to Jesus” moment and the show sold the idea that through patience, communication, and good deeds, situations that seem hopeless can be solved. We can all come together to make a better word and defeat the monsters in society. Today, the main characters – notably they’re mostly Millennials – are resigned to the unfavorable realities of the world and less interested in revolutionary change and more focused on how they can make small strides to ensure that a cruel world is a little less cruel. Some of this is due to their experience in seeing how much more successful small deeds and baby steps have been at mitigating the problems of society versus the colossal failures of “all in” revolutionary tactics, similar to how older liberals feel in the real world.
One major turning point in the series was the 2021 episode about the murder of George Floyd a year earlier. In the final scene of season four’s episode "Here It Comes Again,” while eating together at the firehouse, the characters watch news reports of Floyd’s murder. Their initial reactions range from shock to disgust to what almost looked like guilt and embarassment from Jack Gibson (Grey Damon), the only white guy on the team.
In the next episode, we see their processing of Floyd’s murder. The characters are angry, despondent, and resigned, but then become determined to make something good out of it. Several storylines are born from this, including the creation of Crisis One – a first response unit that responds to minor 911 calls, like domestic disturbances, with EMTs, firefighters, and social workers first before police. In the real world, this is one of the most prominent policy initiatives to come from the Black Lives Matter movement. The unit has some successes, but becomes a political football for the rest of the series, further dissoultioning the characters.
In the episode that aired on May 9, the character Maya, who is a bisexual white woman from a conservative background, approaches her estranged brother, part of a far-right MAGA-type movement that protested a Pride parade. She hopes she can convince him to walk away from that toxic regressive political culture. If this episode had aired in 2019 or 2020, it would have ended with Maya’s brother having a redemption arc where he returns to her, discusses how his pain has been manipulated by destructive bigoted forces and they reconcile. This happened to several other characters on the show, notably Sean Beckett (Josh Randall). Instead, Maya is forced to contend with the reality that she will never change her brother and she will have to cut him out of her life. This is reminiscent to what many liberals and leftists have had to do with their Trump-supporting loved ones after years of hoping to persuade them to walk away from the MAGA cult, especially in the wake of January 6th.
In the final season, the characters are fully resigned to the idea that some of the destructive forces in society – inequality, racism, xenophobia, the quest for power and supremacy – are not going to be fully defeated and no revolutionary calvary of Good is coming to vanquish the Evil if we only show them the way. This was a basic premise of Wokeism, that people who engage in these destructive racist, bigoted movements which foster inequality and injustice just need to have their eyes opened to what is happening. Station 19 premiered at a time when that concept was at its zenith, and the show appeared to be a guide on how to win that battle. In its final season, it is teaching us merely how to mitigate it in our own corner of society, because perhaps it is undefeatable. For a show created to serve as a voice in the fight against injustice that became – every pun intended – a five-alarm fire when Donald Trump won the presidency, it feels as if it's ending with a whimper, not a bang.