'Brilliant Minds' and 'English Teacher' show burnout like in real life

A pair of actors playing doctors in white lab coats talking in a hallway

By Whitney Friedlander

Sept. 24, 2024 3 AM PT

Exhaustion. Anxiety. The fact that you may be reading this article during another meeting that should have been an email. Reports of burnout have been in the news for years, especially in fields such as medicine, education and — ahem — journalism.

And yet, TV shows about people in these professions are powering through.

Sometimes this is through the benefit of experience. ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” which returns for its 21st season on Thursday, has been on so long that it’s seen character Taryn Helm (Jaicy Elliot) leave the industry to work at a bar before returning to the high-stakes/high-drama world of medicine. She’s now co-chief resident at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.

And sometimes, it’s about adding modern awareness to established genres and tropes. The new version of “Criminal Minds,” fittingly subtitled “Evolution,” which recently completed its second season on Paramount+, follows its CBS forefather in being a show about criminal profilers. But it’s also blatant about the toll the job can take on characters’ mental health.

In NBC’s new medical drama “Brilliant Minds,” which premiered Monday, burnout is omnipresent. Zachary Quinto stars as Oliver Wolf, a dedicated neurologist known for bursting into locker room speeches — “Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can’t breathe,” deadpans one of his interns, played by Aury Krebs — but not everyone portrayed on the show is always so confident. Oliver and the other doctors are fallible, be it freezing up during a spinal tap or completely overstepping into their patients’ personal lives to facilitate a father-daughter reunion.

“Brilliant Minds” creator Michael Grassi wants audiences to know that, for the most part, this is OK. He describes his show as a “very much a high-pressure workplace drama where our doctors are tirelessly and selflessly helping patients and their health and their mental health, while at the same time neglecting their own mental health in very real and relatable ways.”

A woman in blue scrubs and a camo jacket leans her hand against a row of gray lockers.

Grassi’s staff includes Daniela Lamas, a pulmonary and critical care physician who is also a TV writer for medical dramas (her credits include the Fox series “The Resident”).

“People who have underlying anxiety become doctors and that becomes part of their reality,” she says. That’s why it’s important to have these feelings be a constant in the series rather than a specific story arc. “It’s not like something that you shine a spotlight on and it disappears,” Lamas adds.

The “Brilliant Minds” cast and crew also have to keep this momentum going. Unlike, say, the Ben Whishaw-starring 2022 AMC limited series “This Is Going to Hurt,” an unflinching look at the relentless stressors that medicine (specifically obstetrics) can have on doctors and other staff, this show is intended to last several seasons.

“The humor in this show offsets a lot of the potential heaviness of some of the subject matter in a way that feels really real and light,” Lamas says.

Other times, positive outlooks are built into the ethos of the show. This has been seen in ABC’s hit series “Abbott Elementary,” a mockumentary about the teachers and staff at a Philadelphia public school that returns for its fourth season on Oct. 9, and FX’s new series “English Teacher,” another comedy about educators that’s set at a Texas high school. Neither shies away from talking about burnout, nor the many reasons why people leave these professions, but they both still manage to mix pragmatism with optimism.

Justin Halpern, who co-created “Abbott” with Patrick Schumacker and series star Quinta Brunson — the latter of whom was, appropriately enough, too busy filming the show to be interviewed for this piece — says that they haven’t done an episode specifically about burnout because “it’s generally not how teachers talk about it.”

Three actors playing teachers walking down a hallway

He and Schumacker note that there have been storylines that hint at it, like a Season 2 episode that got into the generational divide over whether sick days must only be used for physical health. But Halpern says that for most educators, “burnout is so prevalent and such a part of their everyday lives that they don’t reference it really; it’s just an accepted norm.”

Schumacker adds that the new season will see some characters “take stock of their entire careers,” while Halpern says there will also be one “about the financial stresses of being a teacher.”

But they also say that the natural whimsy of a setting surrounded by young kids helps ground their series and keep it from being too depressing. They feel the show might have a different vibe if it were called “Abbott High.”

“When we were first talking about the show with Quinta, we were bringing up just the production realities working with younger kids … and Quinta, very rightly, was like, ‘If you set this show in high school with older kids, there are [different] levels of kid interaction and drama that happen,” Halpern says. “It takes away some of the lightness that you can have exist within an elementary school.”

But even the way we look at these stories has changed.

Older TV shows such as “Welcome Back, Kotter” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and even newer series such as “Derry Girls,” taught us that principals and other school figureheads ruled by intimidation. But in “English Teacher,” Enrico Colantoni plays Grant Moretti, a walking ulcer of a school principal who somehow manages to handle all the helicopter parenting, feuding students, budget cuts and everything else that’s thrown at him. He is also the shield that takes much of the abuse so that Brian Jordan Alvarez’s younger, more wide-eyed titular English teacher, Evan, continues his pursuit of nurturing young minds.

A man in a suit and tie sitting at a desk and leaning back with his hand extended

A friend of Colantoni’s is a retired principal. He listened to her stories of death threats and harassment and says he asked himself, “How does one embrace the responsibility they have without any authority? How do you want to continue doing your job? … It’s like you’re paid to do something, but you’re constantly being criticized.”

“Everybody starts out wanting to save the world and give it a different perspective,” he says. “And then, it just becomes about, well, if you affect one person or two people over the course of your career as a teacher or as an actor…”

He adds that “people who go into any profession for the wrong reasons won’t last long enough to get burned out.”

Bernice Pescosolido, a sociologist and the founding director of Indiana University’s Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research and Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Sciences, says burnout might be a buzzy term right now, but it’s not a new phenomenon. She mentions the Japanese word karoshi, a term that means death from overwork. She says other terms such as nervous breakdown, anxiety and PTSD may get overused, or misused, but they’re also “ways that the lay public understands mental distress.”

“I think maybe there are lives without stressors, but I doubt it,” Pescosolido says.