On Jan. 9, the Dickey Center for International Understanding hosted an event titled “Care Culture in America: Who’s Not Being Served?” The event featured Roshan Sethi, a Harvard Medical School oncologist and co-creator of the medical television show “The Resident,” who discussed biases in Hollywood and the medical profession.
Approximately 65 people attended the event in Haldeman Hall, while more than 450 watched the livestream on YouTube. During the event, Sethi said his dual experiences as a medical professional and Hollywood director and screenwriter informed his approach to creating “The Resident” — a television show that represented medicine in a way that felt “real” to him.
“[Co-creator Amy Holden Jones and I] decided to co-create a show that was about medicine that would be honest about its unsavory realities,” Sethi said. “We sold the show to Showtime, and we wrote a pilot that contained things that had actually happened to me, where every single lead doctor was Indian, Asian or Nigerian — the children of immigrants who are a major force in every medical school and public health system in the country.”
Despite his role as a co-creator, Sethi said the show was “sanitized” by Fox, which purchased the series from Showtime in 2017. For one, Fox executives “said there was a resistance to Black leads” because “it didn’t sell well in European markets.”
“Fox, like every studio and financier in history, believes that white leads lead to better foreign sales,” Sethi said.
Sethi said his experience creating the show made him realize that he experiences “the matrix of racial inequity” in “two completely different ways” in Hollywood and in medicine. He perceives South Asians and “really any minority group” as the “creative underclass” in Hollywood, while in medicine he described himself as an “overrepresented minority”
“I was actually one of the first Indians to co-create a network television show,” Sethi said. “In medicine, I’m not the first Indian to do anything, and in the hospital I personally am very seldom the direct recipient of racism.”
In medicine, Sethi observed how racial bias influenced patient care, specifically concerning organ transplantation.
“In real life, the same quality of care is not delivered to everyone in the hospital,” Sethi said. “… I remember vividly working as an intern on a cardiology floor, where I saw very clearly who was referred for transplant.”
Art, Sethi said, is his solution to racial bias in both medicine and Hollywood.
“We count on art to teach us about the world, to teach us about people we do not hang out with, especially TV and movies, because race is inescapable visually,” Sethi said. “… In the face of entertainment that mostly looks one way, how do we generate imaginative sympathy for people who don’t look like us?”
Television and movies allow viewers to “imagine human feelings and thoughts in people” who look different and can influence “unconscious bias” towards others, Sethi added. For example, screenwriting and medicine both require compassion, he said.
“What I love about writing is that it is a radical act of empathy,” Sethi said. “… Medicine also requires radical empathy for everyone. You take care of everyone regardless of who they are.”
Rena Shi ’26 said she attended the talk because she has “always been really interested in health disparities.”
“I thought that it’s also rare to see a person of color working in the entertainment industry,” Shi said.
Olivia Schneider MED’25, who attended the event, said she appreciated the “real stories” Sethi told.
“I feel like most stories you hear on race can get hypothetical or they feel not applicable, but [Sethi’s] stories … felt a lot more realistic than some of the hypotheticals we’re taught in class,” Schneider said.
