Ever have one of those endless days at work? For 15 hours in the Pitt, the emergency room that lends its name to the Max medical drama, a team of doctors and nurses, led by Dr. Michael Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), have been tackling every woe that human frailty and the city of Pittsburgh can throw at them.
What do they treat? You name it. Mass-shooting injuries. Overdoses. Problem pregnancies. Heart attacks. Measles.
What do they really treat? Despair. The flood of opioids. The lack of insurance. The lack of support networks. Male rage. Rage, in general. The breakdown of the public health system. The breakdown of the public.
Over a long, stressful, yet reassuringly competent and entertaining first season, which wrapped up on Thursday, “The Pitt” generated old-school melodrama out of a simple understanding: The E.R. is where people end up when something goes wrong, either with the body individual or with the body politic.
And what is wrong with the American corpus? Buddy, take a number; the waiting room is full.
If the concerns of “The Pitt” are of-the-moment, its appeal is as old as rabbit-ear antennas. It’s a Big Fat Hospital Show, wringing suspense and jerking tears out of life and death weekly. It is a successor, almost a crypto-sequel, to a specific Big Fat Hospital Show — “ER,” the alma mater of Wyle; the “Pitt” creator, R. Scott Gemmill; and the producer John Wells. (The estate of Michael Crichton, the creator of “ER,” has filed a lawsuit accusing “The Pitt” of being an unauthorized reboot. Warner Bros. Television, the studio that produces “The Pitt,” has called the claims “baseless.”)
Three decades ago, “ER” was itself a new spin on a hoary genre, and “The Pitt” shares some of its predecessor’s hallmarks. There’s the adrenaline pace, with the camera chasing doctors and nurses around a fully built-out hospital set. There is the dedication to technical realism. (“Does [show] get [factual detail] right?” is my least favorite standard for judging art, but if that’s your thing, medical professionals give it high marks.) The season even bookends its beginning and ending with scenes on the roof, calling back to the site of several high-drama “ER” moments.
Above all, there is the cast of idiosyncratic characters whose personalities are revealed under pressure. We met Wyle on “ER” as John Carter, a medical student on his first day in the trenches. As the grizzled and careworn Dr. Robinavitch, known as Robby, he oversees a new infusion of blood: Mel (Taylor Dearden), a resilient, intuitive resident whom the show suggests is neurodivergent; Whitaker (Gerran Howell), a sweet med student from Nebraska with an unfortunate penchant for getting bodily fluids sprayed on him; and many more, from eager newbies to prickly old hands. “The Pitt” does nothing small, including its call sheet.
Eventually, the show makes clear that you are not watching NBC in 1994. There is a lot more cursing. The gore is more graphic, the prostheses more up-close and personal. The almost-real-time story — while “episodic” in the sense that patients cycle in and out — is more serial in a way that befits streaming. (While dropping the entire season at once would undercut the throwback vibe, I don’t think that would be a bad way to watch the show.)
What most makes “The Pitt” a TV series of its moment, however, is its diagnosis: It pinpoints the widespread feeling that everything now is sick and broken, from systems to people to social compacts.
A big precipitating factor is Covid and the aftermath of the pandemic on health, system strain and trust. This arises most directly in Robby’s story: It is the four-year anniversary of his mentor’s death in the midst of the Covid onslaught, for which Robby still blames himself.
There is trauma in the aftermath. There are staffing issues, especially among the nurses. There is drug abuse, among the patients and staff. There is mistrust, both personal and social, personified by a couple who did their own research on vaccines and are now refusing a needed spinal tap for their measles-stricken son. (That story line became even more darkly timely since the series premiered in January, with measles outbreaks in several states and the elevation of vaccine skeptics in the government.)
And the pervasive chronic condition is anger. The charge nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) is punched by a frustrated patient; assaults, we are told, are common here. A mother comes to the E.R. under a pretext because she wants help with her teenage son, who has been keeping a kill list of female classmates. Cassie (Fiona Dourif), the resident who intercedes in that case, herself wears an ankle monitor and has a restraining order against her connected with her acrimonious divorce.
Robby, too, is chock-full of anger, which makes him an engaging protagonist — it’s satisfying to watch him tell the anti-vaxxer parents to stop consulting “Dr. Google.” Wyle, like Alan Alda on “M*A*S*H,” balances the character’s edginess with a soulful weariness. But “The Pitt” leaves open the question whether that anger makes Robby a better doctor, much less a happier person.
Regardless, this is not a workplace suited to self-care. The staff is mutually supportive, in a harried way, but the work is relentless: There is too much, and then there’s one more thing and then there’s a mass shooting at a downtown festival and the doors blow open. This last event — the kind of Very Special Crisis that sometimes sent “ER” overboard but feels like another day at the office here — finally leads Robby to break down, slouching on the floor in a pediatric room turned temporary morgue, the sheeted corpses overseen by cheerful painted animals.
If I make “The Pitt” sound intense, well, it is. But it is miraculously not a bummer. It has a mordant sense of humor and irony. Among the mass-shooting victims is a bloodied clown who was performing at the festival. “You must really love kids,” Whitaker tells him. A perfect beat passes: “Not really.” Every so often, the E.R. is visited by rats, little symbols of disrepair and instigators of slapstick freak-outs.
It’s when the chaos relents and “The Pitt” embraces its seriousness and lessons that you sense the show’s network-TV heritage and its drawbacks. The series often doesn’t trust the audience to get its serious points without a ham-handed line of dialogue — “I doubt she’ll be back, but sadly there will be many, many more just like her” — or a didactic lecture.
Even that old-time-TV corniness is a form of nostalgic fantasy. It calls back to a time when medicine was uncomplicatedly valorized instead of contested, when the small-l liberal belief in institutions serving a collective public good was so broadly accepted it was the stuff of prime-time melodrama cliché.
There’s a flip side, though, to all these stories of heroism. If the message of “The Pitt” is that ingenious, self-sacrificing healers will somehow get the job done anyway — despite cutbacks and anti-science and the breakdown of the social fabric — why bother fixing these bigger systemic problems? We’ll be fine, right? If you think too much about how this fantasy relates to real life, it starts to seem like palliative care for a terminal patient.
Still, when those doc-drama opiates whoosh into your bloodstream, they feel good. I’ve seen “The Pitt” described as “competence porn,” and it is that; there is something satisfying in seeing professionals snap into gear to troubleshoot the human body. But it is also care porn, offering the reassurance that when your most important machine breaks down, even if it is your fault, your fellow humans will fight through exhaustion and trauma to repair it.
Above all, it is resilience porn, a 15-episode story of a tattered safety net catching body after body, stretching and straining but somehow holding. For now, anyway. As Robby says to close out the season, “Tomorrow’s another day.” Probably a long one.