For the past 14 weeks, I’ve lived out the “bro think he on the team” meme by tuning into “The Pitt” and watching half of an episode with my hands over my eyes. Max’s new medical drama is immediately enthralling, and it is by far the best thing I’ve seen on TV in a while.
Season one consists of 15 episodes, each set in real time throughout a 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room, which the attending doctor Robby Robinovich calls The Pitt. In the first episode, the audience is introduced to the inner workings of the ER through a trio of medical students on their first day in residency.
This narrative structure may sound trite, but the intensity of the real-time episodes throws a wrench in the generic medical drama set up. Without exploring the nurses and doctors’ home lives or doling out exposition dumps, the show somehow manages to characterize every one of the dozen central protagonists within the first hour.
I was shocked after the first couple of episodes as every character started to ease into their arcs and the trajectories of how they would evolve became clear. There’s a delicate balance at play to convince the audience every character can somehow change within the span of 15 hours.
It’s a magic trick I can’t wrap my head around. I was genuinely surprised by how much I cared about every single person and felt they were completely different from the beginning by the time their arcs concluded in the season finale.
The conductor of the orchestra of blood and heart monitors is Dr. Robby, one of the most compelling lead characters I’ve watched in a TV show like this. Noah Wyle, a former cast member on 1994’s “ER,” plays Robby with stoicism. Showing glimmers of vulnerability and paternal instinct, he’s impossible to take your eyes off — especially during scenes where he verbally spars with anti-maskers or disgruntled patients who don’t believe in the nursing shortage.
Throughout the day, Robby develops a bond with the three med students: Santos, Whitaker, and Javadi. What started as caricatures — Whitaker as the doe-eyed farm boy, Santos as the headstrong bully, and Javadi as the awkward kid genius — developed into something truly touching thanks to Dr. Robby’s mentorship.
The show expects you to be familiar with the archetypes of TV. Langdon is the cocky, quippy second in command with Robby and is the character who delivers the most laughs for most of the season. By the end, though, his character is taken in some truly heartbreaking directions that upend genre conventions.
Every character undergoes some sort of evolution like this, and it all happens so seamlessly because of how well the show immerses audiences in the chaos of emergency medicine.
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Patients enter the ER in the first episode and only get a five-minute scene before they are discharged, or they might stick around in the background of the story until the finale. Every time the doctors began helping a new patient, I had no idea whether I’d need to remember their gimmick for seven episodes or seven minutes; it constantly demanded my attention.
It’s not like you need a chart to keep track of everybody, though. Part of the magic trick is in the editing, which gives you a glimpse at where everyone is, their reactions to events they have nothing to do with, or the sporadic status of their medical care throughout episodes. None of these brief cuts feel like obvious reminders, but rather subconscious check-ins that are perfectly scattered throughout the show, so I never felt lost.
As I joked about in the beginning, the intensity comes mainly from the gory case work. I’m not squeamish, but I occasionally needed to look away from my TV during scenes of doctors slicing into burnt bodies or removing items from any and all places inside and outside of the human body.
Being on a streaming service grants the show the ability to get wild with the number and variety of patients, something not possible on network TV. Everything the show does is built upon the network medical dramas that have been a staple of TV since MASH. “The Pitt” just executes the formula on the highest possible level.
I greatly enjoyed my time in “The Pitt” and highly recommend everyone join the Pitt Crew. Pitt-heads? Luna-Pitts? I’m workshopping fanbase names. Let me know if you have a better one.