By Variety | Created at 2025-01-09 14:22:50 | Updated at 2025-01-09 23:37:37
9 hours ago
When watching the premiere of Max medi- cal drama “The Pitt,” one might feel as if they’ve stepped into a time machine. The series stars Noah Wyle, who rose to stardom in the future-celebrity-studded cast of “ER.” “The Pitt” was created by R. Scott Gemmill, who served as an executive producer on the later seasons of “ER.” The pilot is directed by executive producer John Wells, the initial showrunner of — do I even have to say it? — “ER.” That “The Pitt” takes place in a major hospital’s emergency department seems almost redundant to mention.
Gradually, though, there are signs that the Max series is not a copy-and-paste of its predecessor. Before we enter the belly of the beast, the establishing shots are of Pittsburgh, not Chicago. (“The Pitt” is a double entendre, referring to both Pittsburgh Medical Trauma Hospital’s namesake city and its employees’ nickname for the ER.) Wyle’s “ER” character began as a fresh-faced medical student, but the actor has aged into the role of Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinovich, an empathetic attending physician. And most notably, where episodes of “ER” would often cover an entire shift, “The Pitt” plays out in close to real time. In short: While you can see why the estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton has claimed “The Pitt” is an “un- authorized reboot,” the show itself quickly undermines the allegation.
Its structure recalls Fox’s “24” — like “ER,” another relic of broadcast TV’s cultural dominance, just before it was fully disrupted by cable and streaming. The 15-episode order for “The Pitt,” each installment of which documents an hour of Dr. Robby’s 7 a.m.-to-10 p.m. shift, marks a reduction from the two dozen chapters a network schedule could accommodate. But for a streaming service like Max, it’s well above the norm, and a remnant of the series’ network television roots. “The Pitt” doubles down on the realism that made “ER” a sensation, working topical issues like opioid abuse and the pandemic into a frantically paced plot that effectively induces the same sense of overwhelm in the audience that its exhausted characters live with every day. The show makes obvious use of the creative team’s expertise while adjusting the format just enough to give “The Pitt” an identity of its own.
Robby, a calm and experienced leader with a phenomenal bedside manner, acts as a center of gravity in an ever-swirling maelstrom of doctors, nurses, students, social workers, ambulance drivers, administrators and patients. So many patients: “The Pitt” spends a lot of time in the waiting room, and one of the most compelling uses of its hour-by-hour concept is to highlight just how long the non-critically sick and injured have to wait before their needs are seen to. It’s a nod to the systemic issues with American healthcare the show’s protagonists have little space to consider as they’re sorting through the onslaught. The compressed chronology also turns patients into recurring characters. Where they might appear for a single episode on a standard medical show, these charges instead linger for several, giving “The Pitt” room to make them more developed and less interchangeable — a subtle counterweight to how people are too often treated as numbers once they pass through a hospital’s doors.
The cast of “The Pitt” is impressively, dizzyingly huge, so much so that entire sub-groups (like the ambulance crew) are only introduced several episodes in. Naming every ensemble member would take up the rest of this review, but Robby’s colleagues include Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), a charge nurse who runs the floor like she’s in the Navy and with a soft Yinzer accent; Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif), an older resident and single mom from an unconventional background; and Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), a cocky new face gradually humbled by the pressures of her first day on the job. Taken together, the cast is a swirling mass that rarely comes into focus, but becomes familiar in short flashes.
Wells’ initial direction at least orients the viewer in the physical sense, establishing the geography of the ER as the show’s expansive, yet limited, setting. (I could count on one hand the number of scenes in nonfluorescent light.) The layout is the first of many details designed to imbue a sense of authenticity, from the constant stream of medical jargon to dropped pearls of shared knowledge. In the premiere, we witness the daily influx of elderly patients around 7:30 in the morning, because the local nursing home conducts bed checks at 7. The only obstacle to the resulting immersion is the release schedule: “The Pitt” is a perfectly intuitive binge, but will instead come out in weekly intervals after a two-part premiere.
The realism of “The Pitt” has its limits. Cumulatively, the sheer profusion of unusual diagnoses, outlandish injuries and ripped-from-the-headlines cases like an abortion-seeking teen from Tennessee start to feel more like a writers’ room producing plot than a slice of life. “The Pitt” nevertheless joins “St. Denis Medical,” the workplace sitcom that airs on NBC, the former home of “ER,” in a welcome wave of medical shows that depict hospitals as overburdened social safety nets rather than idealized sites of heroism. It’s true that Robby, haunted by the death of his mentor in the early pandemic, bears some resemblance to the self-aggrandizing surgeon Dr. Bruce from “St. Denis” — himself a parody of the medical genre’s handsome, male, self-serious protagonists. But Wyle affords Robby enough infectious warmth and believable flaws to make you believe he can marshal his troops, and his audience, through a grueling 15 hours.
The first two episodes of “The Pitt” will stream on Max at 9pm ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Thursdays.
