I remember the exact moment I lost patience with ER, the previous series by The Pitt creators R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells. For years, it was the show I watched together with my parents. It aired Saturdays right before Frasier, which formed a pairing that appealed to everyone.
Year in, year out, we witnessed patients come and go to a hospital where the doctors, nurses, and staff all went through their days with increasingly high levels of drama. After a while, I noticed the situations become more horrific by the episode. What began as a stabbing escalated into a shooting, a kitchen fire turned into a destroyed building. Eventually entire helicopters crushed staff in the parking lot.
We were tuning in for trauma porn, and I had enough of it.
Two decades later, The Pitt revives the drama but mixes in another vintage network thriller, 24, to the format. Instead of days or weeks, we follow a single 15-hour shift in a busy Pittsburgh emergency room. Our hero, Dr. "Robby" Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), is indistinguishable from that other show. Call him Dr. John Carter and it would remain the same series.
Returning to the second season a year later, The Pitt feels even more like a throwback than before. Again, there are 15 episodes, and each one is built with the kind of intensely watchable proficiency that made ER such a mammoth hit. There is no question this is finely directed and acted melodrama. My objections are not with the presentation, only the content.
Season 2 finds Robby heading off on a sabbatical after his last shift on the fourth of July. He's joined by the new attending physician, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who is so thinly drawn they might disappear if viewed from profile. Although, let's face it, every character here is a caricature. They're vessels for big and loud emotions, not much else.
But it's Al-Hashimi who gets the roughest treatment, as The Pitt has barely moved forward in depiction of anyone that isn't an old-school loose cannon doctor like Robbie. She appears unexpected to her position, as if nobody had ever met her before the appointment, and institutes major overhauls without asking anyone. These include an AI app she's pushing through despite obvious issues in implementation. When questioned, she snips and walks out in a tantrum, while Robbie sagely nods, as if aware that all this shall pass.
This continues in other areas as well, where even the most minor situation is down to the saint-like Robbie to solve. He wanders the hallways dropping folksy wisdom and actions that always, always turn out as the best option – even when they're wrong. One wonders how anything in this hospital works without him.
Part of the drama comes from the location, a training hospital where new students face the unexpected at every turn. Yet the doctors don't appear to have adjusted any better. It's almost funny how every transition between patients is an opportunity to bicker or start some new feud that will last an episode or two.
The effects and makeup are all first class. I can believe this is how things look like in real life. But I can't help but wonder what it serves. There's a level of voyeurism to the whole thing, like we can't wait to see what gross or horrific thing happens next. After all, it's not happening to us.
Yet I can't get over how everything else beyond the medical elements feels wrong. Watch, for example, how a doctor in training escorts an Alzheimer's patient to see the body of their dead partner after previous attempts to tell her have failed. Alternatively, why is the new attending physician so lost on basic hospital procedure, yet extremely down on the marketing talk of the latest generative AI?
The answer, of course, is because it makes for good drama, and in the most superficial terms, that's precisely what The Pitt is. As a throwback, it captures the sense of old-fashioned weekly network serials and delivers exactly the kind of easy-to-consume drama most will love.
There's an argument to be made that seeing all of this in such a way reminds us of the humanity and difficulties of working in this environment. Yet because of its very nature, The Pitt doesn't allow us to know more of the patients beyond their afflictions. They become "the guy with the tumor" and "the lady with the wound". A different series would make a case about how underfunded and crowded hospitals make us all into a nameless and faceless flood, but this isn't it.
If you're like me and you've seen enough misery that viewing it as entertainment, especially melodrama, feels wrong on a fundamental level, you won't enjoy The Pitt. It just feels like a poor allocation of such talent.
