Faculty Consulted on Blockbusters Like “The Pitt,” “Sinners”

“It’s a little bright in here,” the doctor says, shutting off the lights in the examination room in a busy ER. She also takes the time to turn off a device that’s beeping and close the doors to the rest of the bustling emergency room. “Sorry—the, uh, ER can be kind of noisy.”

“I agree,” the patient replies.

That moment of understanding between a resident physician and a patient who was autistic, in HBO Max’s The Pitt, was originally conceived by Wendy Ross, a professor at Thomas Jefferson University and the director of Jefferson Health’s Center for Autism and Neurodiversity.

Ross served as a consultant on the first season of the show, giving input into a character the showrunners were planning—a female doctor with autism. Ross said she connected with the writers and producers on an hourlong Zoom call, during which she suggested a scene in which the doctor communicated with a patient who was autistic more effectively than another non-autistic doctor had.

She had one overarching tip about the character, Mel King, a spunky second-year resident played by actress Taylor Dearden: “Especially if it’s a woman, that they should make it really subtle” that she is autistic, Ross said. “A lot of women don’t even know. They should definitely not make her a savant.”

Indeed, the show doesn’t confirm whether Dr. King is autistic, but fans have noticed that she exhibits a lot of traits of autism, such as self-soothing, enjoying repetitive tasks and missing social cues; plus, her sister is autistic. (Dearden has said in interviews that she thinks of the character as having ADHD, like herself.)

Ross said she’s grateful she had the chance to shape an accurate autistic character in what has since become an incredibly popular TV show, winning five Emmy Awards for its first season. The show wraps up its second season tonight.

“Representations in TV and movies and media are very important because they reach more people than the news or other didactic information,” she said. “Explaining the nuances of demonstrating them in a story line is very powerful.”

TV and film writers frequently tap professors and other experts to consult on productions, as they can provide everything from answers to specific, niche scientific questions to advice on aesthetics for time period or cultural accuracy. But The Pitt, which earned critical acclaim for its realistic portrayals of not only obscure medical conditions but also insurance issues and health-care worker burnout, had a team of physicians who worked as on-set consultants alongside the real-life nurses who play the nursing team in the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. The show’s star and executive producer, Noah Wyle, and others have has credited its success in part to that on-set team.

“We’ve got tons of experts around to make sure this is as accurate as we can make it,” Wyle said in a promotional video.

For professors, consulting on such shows and movies is often a rare opportunity to showcase their scholarship and expertise in front of a mass audience. It also reflects higher education’s growing dedication to public scholarship, which some have argued is key to combating rampant misinformation and rebuilding public trust in both higher education and science broadly.

Hollywood, Health and Society is a program at the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center that connects experts, including Ross, with writers and producers looking for answers to science and medicine questions. Kate Langrall Folb, HH&S’s program director, said it’s been around for 25 years, with the goal of making medical story lines more accurate.

Folb’s passion for helping the entertainment industry craft accurate medical narratives dates back to the ’90s, when she worked with another organization whose mission was to combat misinformation about the AIDS crisis. In the years since then, she said, Hollywood has grown to care even more about accuracy.

“Because [The Pitt] is so incredibly accurate, other medical shows and even daytime soap operas have told us they feel like they really have to up their game,” she said.

That’s where higher ed can help.

Sharing Expertise

For faculty who answer Hollywood’s call (or email), playing even a small role in a major cultural phenomenon can be a memorable experience.

Karlos Hill, a professor of African and African American studies at the University of Oklahoma, was one of the first people Ryan Coogler, who wrote and directed the award-winning 2025 film Sinners, reached out to when he first conceptualized the film. Hill told Inside Higher Ed that Coogler found him through his work on the Netflix documentary ReMastered: Devil at the Crossroads, which was about Robert Johnson, the blues singer who inspired Sinners.

“I never would have expected him to reach out to me, to want to have a conversation about the [Mississippi] Delta, Robert Johnson, the history of lynching and racial violence. All of that gets brought to life in the film,” Hill recalled. He also helped the filmmaker develop the visual and cinematic language of the film. “I think, by how he was thinking about it, I knew it was going to be a special film.”

For her part, Mijeong Mimi Kim, a professor of East Asian languages and culture at Washington University in St. Louis, initially thought the email she got from a Sony Pictures executive asking for her help with the cultural nuances of the animated film KPop Demon Hunters was a phishing scam.

But after searching the executive’s name and figuring out they were legitimate, she signed on as a cultural consultant for what would become the most-streamed movie of 2025. Her role consisted of evaluating historical, traditional and mythological elements of the film for accuracy, including the monsters the titular demon hunters fight; much of her job, she said, involved validating that what they had already written or designed was accurate.

“In terms of the decorations and the props like swords, I had to go back and research … to see if they were really accurate, and they were,” she said. “When the film was released, the first commentary out of Korea was that they were so impressed that the type of swords [the characters] use are all historically traceable.”

But while many faculty consultants do their work remotely, a handful have the unique opportunity to visit a set. When Only Murders in the Building, a Hulu series that films in Queens, N.Y., needed someone to teach actors Richard Kind and Steve Martin bird calls for a story line in the show’s fifth season, the show tapped Kaiya Provost, an assistant professor of biology at nearby Adelphi University, to come help out.

“I got to actually see the sausage get made a little bit, be behind-the-scenes crew for a day, a half day, and then headed out,” she said. “I did manage to make the cast laugh” with one of her zealous renditions of a bird call, “which is probably going to go on my headstone at this point.”

Provost also noted that the actors were already pretty spot-on with their imitations, based on recordings she had provided the production team, by the time she got to set.

Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and the EMS director at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, also connected with The Pitt through HH&S; her calls with the writing team focused on the specifics of emergency medicine in Pittsburgh. Some of the cases she relayed, such as a patient with sickle cell disease featured in season one, were reflected almost verbatim in the show, she said.

But while in Los Angeles for another meeting, the team at HH&S brought her in to meet with Wyle and the writing team. During the meeting, which lasted two hours, she encouraged them to incorporate the history of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, an early emergency medicine division with an all-Black team of paramedics in Pittsburgh in the 1960s.

“You cannot discuss the health-care system in Pittsburgh without discussing Freedom House Ambulance. They’d never heard of Freedom House … I told them, we wouldn’t be there without them,” she said.

In the eighth episode of season one, the show incorporated the historic ambulance service into the story line of a patient, Willie, who surprises the doctors with his medical knowledge and tells the staff he was a paramedic with Freedom House.

Owusu-Ansah said it‘s been impactful to have worked on a show she knows is influencing how Americans think about science and medicine.

“We live in a day and age where media is king—mostly social media, now, but media has such a powerful influence … when it comes to health care, people do lean in to media to get their advice, my understanding is, even more than institutions. People are looking to influencer doctors more than they’re looking to the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins,” she said. “It’s important to have a show that’s spot-on accurate, because for better or for worse, people are going to digest that and take it and run with it.”

The intimacy of films and television shows, which tend to put viewers in the shoes of their characters, can influence how viewers remember and relate to different situations or historical events, according to Alison Landsberg, a professor of art and art history at George Mason University whose research focuses on memory studies.

“Being brought into proximity with a powerful event that’s outside our lived experience can affect how we think about and understand the world, and it gives us a new perspective, which might indeed impact our actions,” she said, describing a phenomenon she has dubbed “prosthetic memory.”

“A lot of really important historical work is being done right now on film and on television, particularly films and television shows engaging difficult pasts in the U.S.”

Provost, the biology professor at Adelphi, said the experience taught her that it’s not necessary to be a public-facing figure or even a longtime professor to contribute knowledge to these projects.

“I think there’s a tendency for folks to be like, ‘I’m not the right person for this, I’m not senior enough,’” she said. “I definitely experience that, but if there’s one thing I would say generally, it’s like, no, anybody of any rank who is an expert in their field can do these kinds of things and it’s not the kind of thing you should shy away from.”