‘The Pitt’ Review: Noah Wyle Scrubs in for Max’s Effective ‘ER’-Adjacent Medical Procedural (original) (raw)
It took a while, but all those hours folks spent marathoning ER and House and other classic medical procedurals during the pandemic lockdown have paid off in a rush of new hospital-set series, including NBC’s slightly above-average Brilliant Minds and promising St. Denis Medical, ABC’s zany Doctor Odyssey and Fox’s Doc.
There’s also been speculation about a full-fledged ER revival. But what we’re getting instead is Max‘s The Pitt, which — despite the presence of ER favorite Noah Wyle as star, executive producer and writer, plus a behind-the-scenes team led by ER veterans John Wells, R. Scott Gemmill, Joe Sachs and more — definitely isn’t an ER revival, especially for legal purposes.
The Pitt
The Bottom Line Starts choppy, grows sturdy.
Airdate: Thursday, January 9 (Max)
Cast: Noah Wyle, Tracey Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, Supriya Ganesh, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Gerran Howell, Shabana Azeez, Katherine LaNasa
Creator: R. Scott Gemmill
Nope! The Pitt is an entirely autonomous series with a new, barely utilized urban setting, an ensemble of new, vaguely familiar characters and a narrative format that’s a bit like ER but a bit like 24, which makes it totally different, or at least somewhat different.
The truth is that if The Pitt actually were ER: Pittsburgh Edition, it probably wouldn’t need to start off as slowly as it does, struggling for at least an hour with introducing characters and an overall situation that don’t really need quite so much establishing. Once it gets going, though, The Pitt emerges as a well-executed medical procedural made by people who know from well-executed medical procedurals, boasting a structural twist that’s occasionally very effective and sometimes just a bit annoying and distracting.
With Gemmill serving as creator and Wells directing the first episode, The Pitt throws us into the chaos of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. The series stars at 7 a.m., and the 15 episodes — critics have been sent the first 10 — take us through a single shift overseen by Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. Each episode covers an hour of the shift in real-time, except that episodes are generally closer to 45 minutes, without the time-jumping offered by commercials, which is the sort of thing that might drive you mad if you think too hard about it.
This happens to be the anniversary of the day when, at the worst of COVID, Robby’s mentor died. And this also happens to be the day that the trauma center welcomes a new class of interns and residents, filling the ER with wide-eyed neophytes like Wyle’s John Carter was in the pilot for ER. But also like in Grey’s Anatomy and 50 other medical procedurals as well. “First Day of Work” is a trope. Deal with it.
Over the course of the opening hour, we meet Robby’s ranking residents, including Collins (Tracy Ifeachor), who we swiftly learn is pregnant; sarcastic and brilliant Langdon (Patrick Ball); Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), whose extra patience with her patients has earned her the nickname Slow-Mo; and single mom McKay (Fiona Dourif), who has a past that will come into play several times in the episodes to come.
Joining the team are Nebraska farm boy Whitaker (Gerran Howell), enthusiastic and awkward King (Taylor Dearden), confrontational Santos (Isa Briones) and 20-year-old prodigy Javadi (Shabana Azeez). Some are students. Some are interns. Occasionally it matters.
Keeping the whole operation running is brassy supervising nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa), who in one scene refers to a group of orderlies as “yinz” so that you know the series is set in Pittsburgh. Otherwise, you’d only rarely guess, since 99 percent of the action takes place inside, and inside was filmed mostly on a soundstage. Uninspired Pittsburgh touches include a surprise lunch delivery from Primanti Bros and a patient asking for a score in the Pirates game. More successful Pittsburgh touches include an elderly patient who was a production designer on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Mostly, it isn’t a very Pittsburgh-y show.
In addition to the dozen main characters, there are countless nurses and technicians and visiting surgeons, some of whom get names and some of whom don’t. For a solid hour, I was worried the series would never hold still long enough for me to invest in any of the characters.
The bedlam, though, is the point. The real-time format is excellently applied in creating the immediacy and, more than that, the simultaneity of a busy trauma center. Twenty things are happening at all times, and rather than your typical medical procedural with a carefully delineated A, B and C story for every episode, the patients pass through the series at different paces and with different levels of urgency. On a practical level, the cases generally start off as perfunctory and repetitive — some drug overdoses, some maladies impacting the unhoused community and lots of workplace injuries. But they escalate in unexpected ways and with unexpected levels of tension, emotion and — easily queasy viewers, beware — goriness. There’s a patient with a “degloved” foot, another with full-body burns, and various scalpels and needles in different orifices. Plus a woman with an insect in her ear and a situation that brings three rats into the ER.
It’s all happening at once, and my favorite thing about the production design is how bright and open the space is, which allows you to pay attention to both the cases in the foreground and all the coming and going in other corners of the frame. It’s designed madness and it’s supposed to come across as dysfunctional and out of control, because The Pitt has points to make — not revolutionary but still very valid — about the flaws of emergency medicine in America in 2024: understaffed hospitals, underpaid doctors, increased privatization, tiers of coverage based on insurance.
All the flaws in the system are embodied by hospital administrator Gloria (Michael Hyatt), who comes in every episode or two and says mean things to Robby about patient satisfaction scores. It’s a one-dimensional characterization that makes even less sense if you consider the real-time nature of the series. If your ordinary series has a villain who shows up once per episode, which means they’re visiting every week or two, that makes sense. If your villain somehow has enough time to drop by and torment you every 45 minutes? Maybe your villain needs a new, more time-consuming, job.
The real-time format is generally less effective when it comes to character arcs. It’s one thing to watch John Carter go from wet-behind-the-ears goof to wise physician over a season or 12 on ER. But the amount of wisdom and maturity gained by Whitaker or the amount of humbling forced on Santos over the course of 10 episodes here doesn’t fully track — nor is it convincing when Robby goes from praising a character and vowing to write them a recommendation for a major fellowship to almost firing them within three hours of the same afternoon. It’s a format better suited for little gags — Robby spends one whole episode trying desperately to make it to the bathroom, only to be constantly thwarted — and major events than internal logic, as Jack Bauer could surely tell you.
Though The Pitt may not, indeed, be an ER redux, it benefits tremendously and unavoidably from the existence of its predecessor. Wyle’s acting skills (and, apparently, his writing skills) were honed in the genre; he spouts jargon like one to the hospital born. Wyle embodies what is both controlled (and nurturing) and unraveling (and dangerous) about Robby well enough that the show probably could do without his COVID flashbacks, which are a needless violation of the format.
For all my initial fears about learning everybody’s name, much less finding actual affection for the many characters, the settling-in process takes only that first hour before the principle heroes — everybody is a hero, everybody is flawed, everybody has semi-cumbersomely inserted backstories — come into relief. However implausible his character’s maturation may be, Howell conveys that growth well and retains dignity through the running joke in which Whitaker is regularly showered in bodily fluids. Dearden has a fragile sweetness that contrasts well with Dourif’s wounded fragility and the hard edge that Briones projects, which you just know will prove to be a cover for her own bruised psyche. The character transitions for Ifeachor’s Collins and Ball’s Langdon are at times too whiplash-y, but both actors sell those shifts well enough.
The series resists stunt-casting the patients-of-the-week (whose presence sometimes stretches through the entire season), but familiar guest stars abound, including Abby Ryder Fortson (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) as a pregnant teen; Mackenzie Astin as the son of an Alzheimer’s patient; and Y: The Last Man star Ashley Romans as a woman with sickle cell, who lets the series confront race-based disparities in care.
While The Pitt projects a disorganized buzz, it builds its bigger storylines deftly, climaxing with a perfect storm of emotional beats in an eighth episode that generates tears that feel far more earned than I would have predicted. This, of course, is something ER used to do spectacularly as well. The Pitt definitely isn’t ER, but at times it does _ER_-adjacent things in a way that fans of the genre will appreciate.