It's easy to understand why the
heirs of Michael Crichton attempted to sue HBO Max for copyright infringement
for The Pitt before it debuted last year. This is, after all, a drama
that is set in an underfunded emergency room in a blue collar city: Pittsburgh
here; Chicago there. John Wells is executive producing it and Noah Wyle, who starred
on ER for eleven seasons, is playing the lead. The character he plays in
Dr. Rabinovich – Dr. Robby – but his first name is Mark, which was Dr. Greene's
first name on ER.
There's also the usual mix of interns
we meet in the first moments, a cynical resident who's in a feud with one of
the surgical residents. We've got a new group of med students who are on their
first day of rotation. We've got bureaucrats telling our protagonist how horrible
job he's doing with patient satisfaction, threatening his job and the place
with being closed. We've got overcrowded waiting rooms and patients in the
hall. We've got regulars that the staff is familiar with, including an old lady
who tells Dr. Robby "Do you want to see my vagina?" Dr. Robby tells
her with resignation he's seen, probably more than once.
So yes I see the overwhelming
similarities to ER which for me would not be a dealbreaker. The reason
after three episodes I'm drawn into it even beyond the usual medical drama is
twofold. For one thing, we're not in Shondaland which means I've now seen three
full episodes and no one's ducked into a closet to have sex. One could forgive
me for finding that refreshing after twenty years and no signs yet of Grey's
Anatomy going anywhere.
The second is more pertinent –
and in fact makes me wonder why for all the raves the show has gotten over the
last six months and is clearly going to be a frontrunner for Emmy nominations
across the board that no one has picked up on it. The Pitt unfolds in
fifteen episodes, each of which take up one hour on a shift. The fact that it is
nearly twice the length of the number of episodes we usually get in an HBO
drama – indeed even more than most network dramas these days – is remarkable in
itself. And it's worth noting that The Sopranos got us used to a
thirteen episode season.
The real similarity that most long-time
TV viewers should be aware of is to 24, the classic real-time drama
where we spent a day watching as Jack Bauer saved the world from terrorist
attacks with the help of tech support, a lot of killing and violence and frequently
the sheer force of his personality at times. No one has attempted anything
remotely like this since – until The Pitt.
The Pitt is the polar opposite of 24 in
every way possible and I don't just mean that was a suspense thriller and one is
a medical drama. 24 was full of technical flourishes: split screens, a
brilliant musical score and an always ticking clock. The Pitt is brilliantly
done technically but in a completely different fashion. There's no rapid cuts
and we follow the characters from crisis to crisis. There's for all intents and
purposes no musical score at all, except for the end. And while we're aware of
the passage of time, R. Scott Gemill and his writers never go out of their way
to remind us of it: there's a subtitle at the start of the episode and that's
it.
There's also the fact that
whenever Jack Bauer was faced with a crisis, he always had cutting edge
(unrealistic) technology to get him through each hour's crisis. The technology
for The Pitt is slightly more advanced than ER but that's more to
do with the passage of time then anything else. There may be an up to date
patient board instead of the dry erase board that we saw at Cook County and
there have been more advances with medicine in the last thirty years. But all
of that barely keeps up to date with an underfunded emergency room in a
hospital that is overcrowded and as is critical to the background of Dr. Robby,
is still recovering from Covid even four years later.
Dr. Robby is hardly working alone
in 'The Pitt' (the nickname of the hospital which the bureaucracy denouncing
being used and naturally everyone does) but because he is played by Noah Wyle,
we follow him constantly. It's easy to see Wyle as John Carter nearly two
decades after we last saw him in the series finale of ER but even though
after three episodes I don't know much of his backstory, it's pretty clear he
doesn't come from the silver spoon background Dr. Carter ever did. One of the
key things that separates Wyle's work on The Pitt as opposed to ER is
the fact that he doesn't have the boyish look to him he once did even in his
final seasons. There was always a boyish quality to Wyle even after he left ER
and spent the last decade working on such entertaining if lightweight TNT
series as Falling Skies and The Librarian. Wyle always looked
like he was in his twenties, even when he was in his forties.
That's almost entirely gone as
Dr. Robby. It's not just the full beard he has covering up that youthful
demeanor; it's as if he has an armor up in the way he talks to so many of the
staff, the way he snaps at the bureaucrats in the hospital; the way he's
clearly far more of a teacher and mentor then John Carter ever was. He bears a
much closer resemblance to Mark Greene; humorous, more cynical and quietly
angrier.
Wyle has more than able support
and while I suspect people will be trying to find the parallels to Cook County
there are more differences and the characters, honestly, engage me more in the
first few episodes than the original cast did in the first season of ER. Tracey
Ifeachor is Dr. Collins, who at one
point may have shared Robby's bed given how they speak to each other and who is
trying to hide a secret from the staff. Patrick Ball plays Dr. Langdon, the
doctor who graduated 'with a degree in cynicism but who is efficient in
everything. Fiona Dourif plays Dr. McKay, who travels like a veteran but has an
ankle monitor than is unnoticed. Supriya Ganesh is Dr. Samira, a compassionate
caring doctor who is derogatorily nicknamed for her slowness. And there's Isa
Briones as Dr. Santos, who clearly thinks she's better than everyone and is so
abrasive you know there's going to be a fight some point.
The most fascinated interns are
Dennis Whitaker, who has the kind of fresh-faced look that reminds you more of
JD on Scrubs then any ER doc and Taylor Dearden as Melissa King, an
emotionally clingy and talented doctor who clearly has some kind of emotional
disorder.
The series is dealing with the
kind of crises that ER dealt with on a weekly basis – except they have
no time to even pause between them. Because the show unfolds in real time, we
stay with cases longer than we normally would on ER and have to deal
with them at a greater level. We deal with two siblings trying to deal with
their father's advance directive to not be kept alive by artificial means and
how that plays out when one can't let go. We see two parents trying to deal
with the fact that their teenage son has overdosed on drugs, that he is brain
dead and positive for fentanyl. And perhaps most striking we see a woman faking
illness because of her teenage son with whom she found a list of girls he wants
to hurt – and who leaves the hospital before Robby can talk to him. If you've
already seen the series we know just how horribly this will end both for the
mother and how the ER will end up dealing with the consequences.
The larger story centered on
Robby is that today is the fourth anniversary of the death of his friend and
mentor Jack Abbott, who held the position before he did. We're still not sure
of the circumstances but everyone is surprised Robby came in today and we're
not sure how well he can handle it.
As I said the show unfolds in
real time and the crises come at a faster pace that I think even Jack Bauer
would be prepared to handle it which is why it's surprising how much better The
Pitt in its first season is handling character development better than
either 24 or ER did in their first seasons or indeed much of their run.
We have a fairly even hold on what we need to know about the characters and
their behavior is also far more entertaining in their treatment of each other.
They know when to be mean, when to be compassionate, when to take a moment of
silence and when you have to laugh. This is true even when rats come in on a
homeless man, whether you're giving a sandwich to a regular who keeps asking
for them or when you're in an ambulance bay sneaking a smoke outside a hospital.
It also helps matters that this show
has a much less dark atmosphere to it then so many of the best Peak TV dramas.
It shouldn't be considering where its set and what its dealing with, but it
helps that after twenty five years of dealing with antiheroes if not outright
villains in so many HBO dramas, Max had created a show where most of the
characters are basically good people, no worse and no better than the ones who
work at your average ER. If you prefer the company of Tony Soprano and
Walter White that might be a disappointment. Given that the first season of
this show averaged an 8.9 rating at imdb.com - considerably higher than Euphoria after
nearly as many episodes over two seasons and even higher than last year's Shogun
after its first season – it turns out that there is market for people who
like these kinds of dramas after all.
It took me as long as it did to get
to The Pitt, I should add, because I've had a busy schedule and didn't
have the time to watch a fifteen episode drama on Max. I knew I'd get to it
eventually, particularly after the Astras flooded it with nominations and lo
and behold HBO did a marathon of the show just this past Monday and I recorded
it all. Three episodes in, it deserves all the raves it gets, all the Emmy
nominations it will receive and all the awards it will win. The Pitt is
a great drama in the old-fashioned sense of the word, reaching back to the
1990s and early 2000s. I liked those shows then and I'm glad to see a new
generation is starting to appreciate them.
My score: 4.5 stars.
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