My time in 'The Pitt'

TV of the highest caliber, the new Max series shows what a medical drama is truly capable of.

Shawn Hatosy, Noah Wyle, and Taylor Dearden in the first season of Max's The Pitt

In tune with the era, the start of 2025 has seen a surge of anxiety-fueled television. From the one-shot, nowhere-to-hide style of Adolescence to the Curb-coded tribulations of The Studio executive Matt Remick – times are tough out here. Even a show like Severance, despite existing outside the realm of ‘reality,’ has challenged viewers with serious emotional intensity in its most recent outing.

Perhaps coincidentally, the year has also seen a resurgence of the medical drama, a genre that’s struggled to recapture its 90's/2000's-era glory back when shows like ER and Grey’s Anatomy reigned supreme. I, for one, have never been a big medical guy with the exception of Scrubs (if that counts), and admittedly didn’t see that changing anytime soon. I don’t know why. As a stubborn and probably pretentious enjoyer of “prestige television,” maybe I simply didn’t trust it when most of my knowledge regarded the genre’s soapier, more melodramatic elements.

But then, one bored night, I turned on a new Max show that had been making the rounds. And in just a few days, The Pitt turned my enthusiasm for the genre from a “meh” to a resounding endorsement… It also wrecked me.

The series is essentially a combination of ER and 24, capturing one long shift in real time at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center – an underfunded, overcrowded hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. It centers on Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (ER veteran Noah Wyle) and his staff of residents, nurses, and interns as they struggle to keep stride during a particularly harrowing day at a place where death and tragedy are commonplace. There’s plenty of procedure to love on an episode-by-episode basis, as each installment includes some assortment of case-of-the-week subplots that are wrapped up by the credits. But it’s ultimately a serialized drama, with tension mounting by the episode and character arcs that operate on a macro scale.

The majority of the season balances these quick cases with long-running narratives that shed deeper light on the perils and sacrifices of working in an emergency room. One of the most prominent cases features a tremendous Samantha Sloyan (a Mike Flanagan regular) as a mother grieving the unexpected brain-death of her teenage son, and how it impacts not just the family but the hospital staff around them. To put it another way, I’m someone who wants to have a career in entertainment, and seeing what the doctors on The Pitt go through on a daily basis makes me realize just how insignificant what I’m doing is in comparison (a question the sixth episode of The Studio deals with entirely).

The Pitt’s real-time format allows for a constant flow of adrenaline with each case while leaving just enough room to breathe, and the show undeniably makes its money in these visceral, fast-paced moments of doctors being doctors. But that isn’t to say the characters and relationships get left behind in the constant stream of patients. Interpersonal dynamics are strong at play even mid-procedure; think Langdon vs Santos or Abbott and Robby’s willingness to bend the rules and take incredible risks. These are all moments that heighten tension regarding the cases themselves while also fleshing out the hospital staff. The show’s format limits how much we can ultimately know about the characters, but the wrtiers squeeze the absolute most out of the confines they’ve chosen to play within.

How well the show translates the heavy medical jargon into graspable dialogue is equally impressive, and much of that is due to the tremendous cast that brings it all together (Wyle, Taylor Dearden, Katherine LaNasa and Shawn Hatosy are my personal favorites). I don’t need to know what a “5 French pigtail catheter” is when Dr. Mohan’s face so clearly conveys that using one in that moment is a huge gamble. This allows the show not to pull any punches when it comes to the technical medical sequences in which every second – and one wrong decision – could make the difference between life and death.

Even if it isn’t quite up to the standards of the show at its best, I still enjoyed the bureaucratic and political side of the season. Part of that has to do with the casting of Michael Hyatt as the aggressive but not entirely unsympathetic hospital boss concerned with better patient approval ratings. Not only is Hyatt tremendous at portraying strict authority with something extra going on underneath, but the casting serves as a direct homage to The Wire, a show with similar themes that featured Hyatt in a prominent recurring role. A lot of her dialogue in The Pitt sounds like it could be pulled directly from the mouth of Bill Rawls or Ervin Burrell, and that’s an overall testament to the show’s writing.

But what truly sets The Pitt apart isn’t the spotlight it shines on these daily tragedies or the injustices of the medical system. It’s how this diverse cast of doctors all process the intense amount of grief in their own ways. Some lash out, some stand tall, and others break down. The bulk of the season, especially the final third, juxtaposes these human responses to grief with the fact that, when you work in an emergency room during an emergency, there’s no time to let the mask slip. Someone new is always around the corner demanding 100% focus and effort if they’re going to survive.

At the center of it all is Dr. Robby, a man who stubbornly came in to work on the anniversary of his mentor’s death. A man who bottles up emotion after emotion until he’s carrying the weight of an entire morgue on his shoulders. I won’t spoil what happens for those who haven’t seen the show, but we’re all people, and people can only hold in so much pain until they either let it out or let it break them. These final episodes pack one hell of an emotional punch and solidify Noah Wyle as not just a medical genre legend, but a television legend full stop.

If I had to critique something, there are only a few small details I can really point to. The first few episodes occasionally struggle with table-setting and exposition – how many times did we need to hear it was the anniversary of Dr. Adamson’s death? – and the later episodes feature a few conflicts that are oddly black-and-white. The two women who get into a scrap in the waiting room are portrayed through comically extreme “mask obsessive” vs “anti-masker” stereotypes, and the anti-MMR vaccine mother, while sufficiently infuriating for both the viewers and on-screen doctors, definitely feels like a bit of a caricature. Most family members in the show, such as the woman who’s unwilling to let her father off of life support throughout the first part of the season, are given enough emotional depth to convey why they might make these decisions in the first place. Any such depth is absent in the case of MMR Mom, but maybe some people are just really like that. I know this complaint sounds small, and that’s because it is. This show is damn near perfect.

Going back and watching early episodes of ER after the fact – a show I had never seen – has been incredibly fascinating. Most obviously… John Carter! It threw me for a loop seeing the jaded Dr. Robby as a fresh-faced, deep-pocketed medical student, and I can only imagine what most ER fans felt after starting The Pitt. ER’s influence as both a medical drama and character drama is undeniable, but I must admit – no matter how charming Doug Ross and Carol Hathaway are, my height of enjoyment with ER comes whenever it most closely resembles The Pitt. Not when it shows traumatized doctors staring out of rainy windows, but when it captures that real-time, live-wire tension that happens when someone stumbles in with a gunshot wound to the belly and only thirty seconds to live.

I’m still in awe as to just how completely this show blew my mind.The Pitt is Drama with a capital D, and I’d challenge anyone to find me a show (at least recently) that can consistently match it in terms of moment-to-moment stakes and tension. I’m partially worried that I’ve now seen the best the genre has to offer, but that might just be another pretentious take on my end. Either way, The Pitt is here to stay, and I can’t wait for season two. It’s supposed to be coming out in early 2026, but we’ll have to wait and see if an ongoing lawsuit from the estate of Michael Crichton (the original creator of ER) will have an impact. In the meantime, I’m excited to see Patrick Ball (Dr. Langdon himself) play Hamlet in an upcoming stage production in Los Angeles, and will surely be keeping my eyes peeled for any updates on season two of The Pitt.