Bury Me in The Pitt
The unending proliferation of medical dramas on TV should mean that one more new medical drama barely makes a dent. How different can they be, really? How much can it possibly matter if one is slightly less frenetic or another has a slightly more charismatic lead character? The basics will remain the same. Guy with heart attack. Tragic death of a young person. Rare and improbable injury. Staffing shortages. Mentorship tensions. TV has produced thousands and thousands of episodes of exactly this.
Like a palate trained on thousands of batches of French fries, though, what this means in practice is that when you suddenly eat an unusually good French fry, you really notice it. It’s not just another French fry. It’s a French fry like the ratatouille from Ratatouille, somehow existing in the eternal present and yet pulling from a whole life of acquired values and desires of what a French fry should be; it is a Proustian French fry, a lovely experience all the more pleasurable because at the same time you keep thinking, But it’s also just a French fry?
Max’s new medical drama, The Pitt, is that Proustian French fry. Even as my brain kept pointing out all the ways its format works against it and all the little bits that could be improved — a few underwhelming performances, some overly obvious dialogue — I found myself powering through The Pitt with so much delight that I became actively annoyed when I had to pause to watch something ostensibly better and more innovative. It has so much of what contemporary medical dramas are often lacking: It moves fast and expects you to keep up and is much more interested in everyday traumas than bizarre medical mysteries. It also has so little of what often makes medical dramas obnoxious: the swelling music cues, the grandiose emotional platitudes, the overall sheen. It’s simple, deceptively so, and if it’s so close to one of the greatest medical dramas in TV history that you could close your eyes and mistake one for the other, who’s complaining?
The Pitt, set in a financially strapped emergency department in Pittsburgh, stars Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, chief attending and the guy in charge of the ER for the single 15-hour shift that provides the entire setting of this season, which premieres its first two episodes tonight. The premise is 24-style: Each episode is one hour of the shift, which means that for the young newbie doctors who show up in episode one (played by Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Shabana Azeez, and Gerran Howell), the whole season is also their first day on the job. Because of that structure, and because of a million other things like a lack of George Clooney and the persistent presence of cell phones, The Pitt is not ER. It’s not! But even without Wyle wearing a stethoscope around his neck and staring mournfully at the parents of a child he could not save, The Pitt would still be the closest any medical drama has come to what originally made ER so magnetic.
First, and maybe most crucial: The texture of it is both palpable and notably different from the glossy, clean, Hot Doctors Look Concerned visual approach of most network medical dramas. The Pit, which is what Dr. Robby calls his place of work, is a crowded, chaotic, and noisy place. The lighting is fluorescent and often unforgiving. Gurneys are parked in the hallways, and the scrubs get wrinkled and dirty. The chairs area, where patients wait before getting called back for treatment, is perpetually overstuffed and full of desperate people with pencils stuck behind their ears. And the storytelling structure matches that overall approach. Rather than one big medical disaster that causes everyone to go into sudden panic mode, the rhythm of the place is about overlapping and unrelenting problems, on every scale from a minor scrape to violent, life-threatening trauma. The best upside of the hour-by-hour premise is how well it supports this element of the show: Some patients come and go quickly; others stick around for hours; and the life-and-death reality of the setting gets played for the sacred and yet utterly quotidian thing that it is, rather than for operatic highs and lows. Yes, this is the ER special sauce, a story density reflected in a crowded set design and so many scattered shifts in focus that even the most emotionally blunt lines barely have time to register. And, yes, it’s fantastic.
Wyle is the best at surfing the show’s tonal waves, reflecting urgency and unflappability while also playing everything with minimal glamour and maximal empathy. The show’s other performance benchmark comes from Katherine LaNasa as the charge nurse, Dana Evans, who has exactly the right level of world-weary competence. Several of the younger cast are also stellar, despite (or because of?) the modest collection of nepo-baby faces the show has collected; Dearden, Briones, and Fiona Dourif are the best of these. Patrick Ball, meanwhile, has an energy and a chin dimple perfectly calibrated to communicate “I’m the hot one and I’m also a problem!”
There are missteps along the way. It’s ridiculous to imagine a scenario where the hospital administrator has to come down not once but many times throughout a single day to deliver exposition about how everyone needs to do more with less, but this is the downside of The Pitt’s one-shift structure. She has to show up multiple times to remind us of the stakes, realism be damned. There’s also a haunted-by-COVID backstory that gives The Pitt an uneasy parallel to Doctor Odyssey. Even though that absolutely would be the thing that’s haunting these doctors (and Dr. Odyssey, to be fair), the trouble is that it’s played with roughly the same amount of melodrama in The Pitt as when a similar story appears in a Ryan Murphy show. It’s not just that the COVID story is presented with a sudden gauzy emotionality, although that certainly jangles against everything else in the show. But in every other way, the show lives in an overwhelmed experience of right now, and character backgrounds appear as incidental discoveries to everything else that’s going on. This one element is too precious by comparison.
None of these few flaws outweigh the larger experience of a wholly engrossing show, competently made and beautifully edited. What’s most strange is that The Pitt should feel intensely familiar. It’s a medical drama. We’ve seen a million of these, and this one in particular is remarkably similar to one of the most famous of the genre. And yet, The Pitt feels like an oddity. It’s the kind of show that the streaming era promised could exist and yet has been so loathe to actually produce. It’s like network TV, with a longer episode count, an episodic conceit, a mixture of short- and long-arc stories, a self-contained set, and a regular cast of characters who show up hour after hour. But it has the bells and whistles that streaming seasons can offer too — nudity and swears, yes, but also more flexible run times and less need for strict act breaks, subtler exposition, and a firmer grip on the season as a whole. It’s very good television that happens to be on a streaming platform, and although that should not feel innovative in 2025, nevertheless here we are. Fifteen episodes is a luxuriously long season, but like French fries, a good batch mostly creates a desire to consume even more. Let’s hope The Pitt, and the model it offers for streaming TV, becomes the rule rather than the exception.
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