Something I have lamented as a parent is that the cultural touchstones of episodic television were not something my kids would experience. Streaming changed the rhythm of watching TV, especially when shows arrive all at once and people watch them at different speeds. The sense that millions of people might be sitting down at the same time to watch the same thing slowly faded away.

Yet somehow, unexpectedly, a hospital drama has given my kids a glimpse of what used to be called Must-See TV.

On Thursday nights, our household now gravitates toward an episode of "The Pitt," which drops weekly rather than all at once. Realistic ethical dilemmas unfold in the span of an hour. What happens when authority figures misuse power over vulnerable people? What does addiction look like when it grows out of something as devastating as losing an entire family in a car accident? The questions are heavy, but the experience feels oddly familiar. We watch together, react together, and then talk about it.

The show also sent me back down a nostalgic rabbit hole. Over the last few months, while I'm glued to my laptop answering emails, I have been catching up on a frankly embarrassing number of seasons of "ER," which dominated Thursday nights when I was younger.

Watching it now is a strange experience as aging has had me rearranging my memories of the past. The character of John Carter once seemed adult to me, even though he was supposed to be the young doctor learning the ropes. Watching now, Carter is a flat-out baby at the start of the series, transforming slowly into caring competence, picking up the ropes from those who drop them, die (RIP Dr. Greene), or have a tussle with a helicopter.

The almost comforting aging of Noah Wylie lets his character in The Pitt, the lead physician Dr. Robinavitch, carry more gravity. Since we stopped Must See TVing, Carter went through COVID-19 like we did and decided to leave Chicago for Pittsburgh. He maybe got a name change to leave his life of inherited wealth behind. He instead inherited Greene's motorcycle and the ability fix the broken bodies that arrive at the hospital doors, with thousands of viewers sitting in living rooms across the country who suspect they could fix Dr. Robby instead.

I missed communal television. I remember watching engagement episodes of Friends with a high school friend while sitting on the floor of her living room, both of us gasping at a fictional romantic high point as though it had actually happened to people we knew. The reaction was ridiculous in retrospect, yet the feeling of shared anticipation was real because millions of other households were reacting at the same moment.

Communal cultural experiences have not disappeared, but many of them now revolve around darker events, like a breaking news alert travels across phones and social media feeds, pulling people into the same moment of shock or grief.

Sure, there's death and overwhelm in The Pitt, too. For example (and spoiler), in the episode when a child dies after falling into a swimming pool. It was brutal television, yet it also opened a conversation. I could talk about water safety and why I pushed them so hard to learn to swim, even though we live in the desert. The scene was fictional, but the discussion that followed was not.

It was infinitely less bleak than an NPR-promoted discussion on the way to school about why there was a bombing of a girls' school.

Streaming gave us endless choices, but what it took away was the shared pause between episodes, the small anticipation of knowing the next chapter would arrive next week and we'd spend that time together. When stories unfold one week at a time, they create space for people to sit together, absorb something at the same pace, and talk afterward about what it meant - until the next episode.

This creation of ritual does not actually require a network to manage, just us. Pick a night, watch something, and let the conversation unfold as there's a sprint to the remote before the next episode begins. Must See TV may not have disappeared; it might be waiting for us to see the need to sit down together again.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Ajeet Mestry at Unsplash