Exhaustion. Fear. The fact that you may be reading this article right now another Meeting that should have been an email. Reports of burnout have been in the news for years, particularly in fields like medicine, education and, ahem, journalism.

And yet television shows about people in these professions are on the rise.

Sometimes this happens through the benefit of experience. ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” which returns for its 21st season on Thursday, has been on for so long that character Taryn Helm (Jaicy Elliot) leaves the industry to work in a bar before heading into the world of high society Operations and the great drama returns to medicine. She is now deputy senior physician at Gray Sloan Memorial Hospital.

And sometimes it’s about bringing a modern consciousness to established genres and tropes. The new version of “Criminal Minds,” appropriately subtitled “Evolution,” which recently completed its second season on Paramount+, follows its CBS predecessor and is a show about criminal profilers. But it is also like that apparently about the toll the job can take on the characters’ mental health.

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Burnout is omnipresent on NBC’s new medical drama “Brilliant Minds,” which premiered Monday. Zachary Quinto plays Oliver Wolf, a dedicated neurologist known for his locker room speeches: “Clear eyes. Full hearts. I can’t breathe,” says one of his interns, played by Aury Krebs, expressionlessly – but not everyone portrayed in the series is always so confident. Oliver and the other doctors are fallible, whether they’re freezing up during a lumbar puncture or completely interfering in their patients’ private lives to facilitate a father-daughter reunion.

“Brilliant Minds” creator Michael Grassi wants viewers to know that, on the whole, that’s okay. He describes his show as “a high-pressure workplace drama in which our doctors tirelessly and selflessly help patients and their health and mental health, while simultaneously neglecting their own mental health in very real and relatable ways.”

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

“People who suffer from anxiety become doctors and it becomes part of their reality,” she says. That’s why it’s important that these feelings are a constant in the series and not a specific story arc. “It’s not like you put a spotlight on something and it goes away,” Lamas adds.

The cast and crew of “Brilliant Minds” also need to keep this momentum going. Unlike, say, the 2022 AMC limited series This Is Going to Hurt, starring Ben Whishaw and an unflinching look at the unrelenting stress that medicine (particularly obstetrics) can place on doctors and other staff, is this show designed for several seasons.

“The humor in this show balances the potential gravity of some topics in a way that feels really real and light,” says Lamas.

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In other cases, positive outlooks are part of the show’s ethos. This was featured in the ABC hit series “Abbott Elementary,” a mockumentary about the teachers and staff of a Philadelphia public school that returns for its fourth season on October 9, and in the new FX series “English Teacher,” a another comedy about educators takes place at a high school in Texas. Neither is afraid to talk about burnout and the many reasons people leave their careers, but both still manage to combine pragmatism with optimism.

Justin Halpern, who co-created “Abbott” with Patrick Schumacker and series star Quinta Brunson – the latter, fittingly, was too busy filming the series to be interviewed for this article – says they didn’t do a special episode about burnout because ” Teachers generally don’t talk about it like that.”

He and Schumacker note that there were storylines that hinted at this, such as a season two episode that featured a generational conflict over whether sick days should be used solely for physical health. But Halpern says that “for most educators, burnout is so prevalent and such a large part of their everyday lives that they don’t really mention it; It’s just an accepted norm.”

Schumacker adds that the new season will feature some characters “taking stock of their entire careers,” while Halpern says there will also be an “on the financial burdens of being a teacher.”

But they also say that the natural moodiness of an environment filled with young children helps ground their series and prevent it from becoming too depressing. They believe the show would have a different feel if it were called “Abbott High.”

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“When we first talked to Quinta about the show, we just brought up the production realities of working with younger kids… and Quinta rightly said, ‘If you’re doing this show in high school with older kids, “There are different levels of interaction and drama between children,” says Halpern. “It takes away some of the levity that you can have in an elementary school.”

But the way we view these stories has also changed.

Older television shows like Welcome Back, Kotter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even newer shows like Derry Girls, taught us that principals and other school figureheads ruled through intimidation. But in “English Teacher,” Enrico Colantoni plays Grant Moretti, a walking school principal who somehow manages to cope with all the helicopter parenting, student feuds, budget cuts and everything else that comes his way. He’s also the shield that absorbs much of the abuse, allowing Brian Jordan Alvarez’s younger, more far-sighted English teacher, Evan, to continue his quest to nurture young minds.

A friend of Colantoni’s is a retired principal. He listened to their stories of death threats and harassment and said he asked himself, “How can you accept the responsibilities you have without authority?” How would you like to continue doing your job? … It’s like you’re getting paid to do something, but you’re constantly being criticized.”

“Everyone wants to save the world first and give it a different perspective,” he says. “And then it just depends on whether you influence one or two people over the course of your career as a teacher or actor…”

He adds that “people who get into a career for the wrong reasons don’t last long enough to burn out.”

Bernice Pescosolido, a sociologist and founding director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research at Indiana University and the Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Sciences, says burnout may be a buzzword right now, but it’s not a new phenomenon. She mentions the Japanese word Karoshia term meaning death by overwork. She says that other terms like nervous breakdown, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder may be overused or misused, but they are also “ways in which the layperson understands psychological distress.”

“I think there might be a life without stress, but I doubt it,” Pescosolido says.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.