The Pitt, Mark Carney, and Competency Porn

Have you been watching the show The Pitt?

It’s a medical drama with a modest budget, a single-location set, and no real romantic subplots driving the story. It swept the Emmy Awards, won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, and earned a third-season renewal before its second season finished airing.

The premise is almost aggressively simple. Its first season of fifteen episodes covered fifteen consecutive hours of a single shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room. No sweeping location changes. No elaborate mythology. Just doctors and nurses doing extraordinarily difficult work under intense pressure.

What attracts people to this story? I mean, medical dramas have been staples on television for years. We have seen this premise before.

A lot of people have concluded that The Pitt is so wildly successful because of the competence of the doctors and nurses. A new term has been coined: “competency porn.” In an increasingly chaotic world, the idea of competency has become incredibly powerful.

These healthcare professionals, anchored by Senior Emergency Attending Physician “Dr. Robby” and Charge Nurse “Dana Evans”, are able to navigate the chaos of a big city emergency room, juggling difficult medical cases with clear confidence. They always know what to do. Even the residents, fresh-faced and dealing with real-world crises not always covered in the textbooks, are brilliant as they learn.

TV Tropes, the crowd-sourced repository of storytelling conventions, catalogued The Pitt as a textbook example of competency porn, noting that "the show is practically a love letter to emergency medicine expertise. Doctors and nurses repeatedly pull off jaw-dropping displays of medical mastery under pressure."

What the show understands intuitively is that competence itself is the drama.

The tension doesn't come from status seeking or personal relationships familiar in other medical dramas. It comes from watching a doctor make the right call under impossible conditions, and from trusting that when they make it, it's because he or she actually knows what they’re doing. Emergency physicians have embraced it as the rare drama that gets the work right.

That accuracy is no accident. It is the entire point. We don't just watch Dr. Robby navigate a chaotic shift. We believe him. And belief is the foundation of everything that follows.

The Mark Carney Experience

In Canada, we have our own vehicle for competency porn – Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Carney is in many ways an unlikely political superstar. While a PhD in economics from Oxford makes for a great CV, it doesn’t usually set a person up as the best choice for “someone to have a beer with,” which has somehow become a litmus test for political success. Carney is not a particularly gifted speaker. When he speaks, there are a lot of “uhs” and long-winded excursions from his main point. He is not, it’s fair to say, a political performer.

But he is, unmistakably, an expert.

Polling research by Abacus Data captured something striking in open-ended surveys. When Canadians were asked to describe Carney to a friend who didn't follow politics, the words that came back repeatedly were "smart," "capable," "knowledgeable," "highly competent," and "economically literate." He was described not with warmth but with trust. The specific kind of trust that comes from believing someone knows what they're doing.

Carney became prime minister not despite being a technocrat, but partly because of it. His expertise, in the face of American threats, was welcomed by Canadians.

In a world of performative politics and three-word slogans, Carney stood out because he knows what matters. That competency was in sharp focus during his now famous speech at World Economic Forum in Davos. Carney delivered what many observers called one of the most significant speeches by a world leader in years, earning a rare standing ovation from the assembled heads of state and global executives. Without once mentioning Donald Trump by name, he declared that the rules-based international order was finished, "a rupture, not a transition," and called on the world's middle powers to stop performing compliance and start exercising genuine sovereignty.

He opened with Vaclav Havel's parable of the greengrocer who hangs a sign he doesn't believe in simply to avoid trouble, then told the room it was time for countries and companies to take their signs down. The speech, which Carney wrote himself, drew on decades of economic expertise and was structured with the precision of someone who had spent years navigating the real levers of global finance.

It was a bold speech in many ways, one sure to anger Trump and exacerbate his wild threats against Canadian sovereignty (and that of Venezuela, and Greenland, and Colombia, and Cuba and on and on…). Trump responded the next day by telling the world that "Canada lives because of the United States," and revoked Carney's invitation to Trump’s now laughably failed Board of Peace. Carney went to Quebec City and told Canadians: "Canada doesn't live because of the United States. Canada thrives because we are Canadian."

The entire sequence illustrated something that goes beyond political courage. It was the confidence of a person who had done the work, knew what he was talking about, and was prepared to make the tough choices and bear the consequences.

Of course, there’s a lot of talk in politics, and that talk is often not matched by action. But Carney is taking concrete steps to deliver on his vision and reduce Canada’s reliance on the now untrustworthy American regime. News broke this weekend that Carney was spearheading negotiations to form a massive new trading bloc composed of the European Union and 12 Indo-Pacific countries as a way to return to a rules-based order for trade and reduce reliance on the American market.

What This Tells Us About Executive Presence

Both The Pitt and Mark Carney’s success point to the same underlying truth. In an age of performance, spectacle, and carefully managed perception, genuine competence has become rare enough to be compelling.

Executive presence is often misunderstood as a collection of surface behaviours like a nice haircut and a loud voice. But what The Pitt and Mark Carney reveal is that the most magnetic form of presence is rooted in something more durable. It is the unmistakable signal that this person knows what they are doing, and that when things get complicated, they will not fall apart.

The leaders who command rooms, attract loyalty, and get trusted with high-stakes decisions are almost always those who have done the hard, unglamorous work of becoming good. Their presence isn't manufactured. It develops from the inside out.

What competency porn reveals, in both its fictional and political forms, is that audiences are starved for this quality. Viewers, voters, employees, board members. They can feel its presence instantly. And they can feel its absence just as fast.

In a world awash with noise, demonstrated ability is quiet. It doesn't need to announce itself. And that quiet confidence, more than any other trait, is what leaders spend their careers trying to earn.

The good news is that it's entirely learnable. It just takes the right work.