Kristin Villanueva, Noah Wyle, and Amielynn Abellera in “The Pitt.” Photo courtesy of HBO Max
Walk into almost any hospital in the United States and pay attention. Not just to the doctors striding in with clipboards, but to the ones who actually hold the room together, who remember your name and your allergy to penicillin and also your birthday because they wrote it on the whiteboard themselves. Chances are at least one of them is Filipino. Chances are they have a group chat. Chances are they have been feeding each other since the morning shift started.
It took American television decades to notice. But notice it finally did.
THE MAFIA HAS ARRIVED
It started with a joke that landed like a truth bomb. In Season 1 of NBC’s mockumentary comedy “St. Denis Medical,” nurse Val pulls aside head nurse Alex and delivers one of the most accurate pieces of hospital orientation anyone has put on network television.
Pointing toward a group of nurses moving through the ward with the synchronized confidence of people who have absolutely done this before, she explains: “That’s the Filipino mafia. Hospitals can feel like high school, there’s cliques, there’s hierarchy, and Mean Girls. And I’d say Rene is definitely the Regina George. But the mafia’s really good, so just don’t mess with them.”
The episode, titled “Salamat You Too” (salamat means thank you in Tagalog), was pitched by an Asian American writer on the team. The creators dedicated it to Filipino nurses after realizing how pervasive yet invisible their presence had been in the genre. Asian Americans make up 8.9 percent of registered nurses in the United States, and roughly half of those are of Filipino descent. The number had always been there. Television had just been looking the other way.
Rene, the de facto leader of the Filipino mafia, is played by Nico Santos, best known as Mateo from “Superstore” and the delightfully cutting Oliver T’sien from “Crazy Rich Asians.” He brings the same sarcasm-as-armor energy to Rene: a nurse who is unapologetically competent, politically savvy within the hospital ecosystem, and completely unbothered by administrators who underestimate him.
Santos modeled Rene’s friction with Alex after a real-life coworker from his restaurant days. “She was lovely, but really bad at her job, and it made my job a lot more difficult,” he said. “I think that’s what Rene’s all about: ‘Do not get in the way of me being able to provide care to my patients.'”
Filipino nurses across the real world lost their minds. Jennifer Beganovic, a registered nurse in Yellowknife, said she “felt so proud” watching the episode. “We are seen, they can see us now, they recognize us. It’s a long time coming.”
THREE PINAYS WALK INTO AN ER
If “St. Denis Medical” gave the Filipino mafia a comedic crown, “The Pitt” handed them a full dramatic arc and an Emmy. The HBO Max medical series, which won Outstanding Drama at the 2025 Emmys, opens its very first episode with Dr. Michael Robinavitch flanked by two Filipino nurses mid-conversation in Tagalog. It is a choice, and it is deliberate, and Filipino nurses everywhere felt it.
Nurse Princess Dela Cruz is played by Kristin Villanueva, a classically trained theater actress whose stage background gives Princess a warm, grounded empathy that carries even the show’s most chaotic ER scenes. Nurse Perlah Alawi is played by Amielynn Abellera, a seasoned stage and screen veteran with credits ranging from “The Cleaning Lady” to “Shrinking” and “NCIS.”
Abellera brings a quiet resilience to Perlah, a steadfast professional balancing high-pressure hospital demands with a rich personal inner life. Together, Princess and Perlah are the nurses you would want in your corner when things go wrong, and the ones you suspect have the best pasalubong in the break room.
Then there is Dr. Trinity Santos.
SANTOS DOESN’T CARE IF YOU LIKE HER
Isa Briones plays Dr. Trinity Santos in “The Pitt,” and she told Refinery29 she finds it “so strange that up until now there has not really been a lot of Filipino representation in medical shows.” She added: “It’s insane because Filipinos make up one of the biggest populations of medical professionals in this country.”
Santos is not a warm character, at least not on the surface. She is a second-year resident who gives everyone unflattering nicknames, defies orders, and operates like she is the only person in the room who knows what she is doing. Half the audience loves to hate her. The other half has just figured out they were wrong about her.
Her original surname was intended to be Shah. After being cast, Briones requested it be changed to reflect her Filipino heritage. She gave the writers a list of Filipino surnames, and they chose Santos. That detail alone says everything about what Briones brought to this role beyond the script.
Born in London to Filipino theater actor Jon Jon Briones and raised in Los Angeles, Isa is herself a theater kid who went from “Hamilton‘s” first national tour to a Broadway debut in “Hadestown” to “Star Trek: Picard,” where she played multiple android roles. Santos is her most human role yet. She told WWD that Santos “is not going to be your canvas for your emotions. She’s going to say exactly how she feels. And I think that’s freeing for me as an actor, and also as a person, to be a complicated female character.”
One of the season’s best scenes is purely Filipino: nurses Princess and Perlah had been gossiping in Tagalog the whole shift. Santos later reveals she understood them the entire time. The ad-lib ending, where Princess says “She looks so white though,” was not in the script. The whole Filipino internet cheered.
Briones told Filipino reporters in a virtual roundtable: “All three of us, we get to show the spectrum of what it is to be Asian, what it is to be Filipino. There is no one way that it looks or sounds or feels or lives. It is everything.”
FOR EVERYONE WHO HELD THE WARD TOGETHER BEFORE ANYONE NOTICED
None of this is fiction, of course.
Filipino nurses, medical technologists, respiratory therapists, physical therapists, caregivers, nursing assistants, pharmacists, and healthcare professionals have been the quiet architecture of hospitals across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and beyond for generations. They trained in the Philippines, sometimes as doctors before requalifying as nurses abroad. They worked night shifts nobody wanted. They covered holidays so someone else could go home to their family. They learned new systems, new accents, new countries, and somehow still found time to organize potlucks in the break room and check if everyone had eaten.
During the pandemic, the world briefly saw what healthcare workers had always known. Filipino healthcare professionals were everywhere. In overwhelmed ICUs. In understaffed elder-care facilities. In emergency rooms running past capacity. Many became the emotional center of institutions under extraordinary pressure, holding together not just patients, but coworkers and entire hospital systems strained to the edge.
And the cost was real.
Filipino nurses in the United States suffered disproportionately high COVID-19 fatalities during the height of the pandemic, a devastating reflection of both how present they were in frontline care and how essential they had become to global healthcare systems. Behind every statistic was someone who had crossed oceans to build a better life, often for people back home they barely got to see enough.
That history matters when audiences laugh at the Filipino mafia jokes in “St. Denis Medical,” or cheer when Princess, Perlah, and Santos slip into Tagalog mid-shift on “The Pitt.” The representation lands because the reality was already there. Television did not invent these people. It finally caught up to them.
And for many Filipinos abroad, seeing themselves reflected this way carries a different kind of emotional weight. It is recognition not just of work, but of sacrifice. Of competence that often went unnoticed because it became expected. Of generations who held hospital wards together quietly enough that the world forgot to ask who was doing the holding.
They deserve Princess and Perlah and Dr. Santos and the Filipino mafia and every healthcare worker who will come after them on screen. They deserved it long before Hollywood got around to noticing.
So this one is for the nurses. The medical techs. The caregivers. The respiratory therapists and physical therapists. The healthcare workers who built lives in fluorescent lighting and twelve-hour shifts. The ones who remembered the patient’s name before the attending did. The ones who carried entire hospital floors with skill, humor, and impossible endurance.
Salamat.
You more than earned the close-up.
