Its creative team includes “ER” alumni, and it is a hospital drama starring Noah Wyle. But it is doing its own thing (and is sometimes very good).
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“The Pitt,” premiering Thursday, on Max, is set in the emergency department of a Pittsburgh hospital, a noble and chaotic environment staffed by sage teachers and eager students, where monitors bleep, the bereaved weep and the waiting room gets fuller and fuller.
There is an overwhelming déjà vu about it all, the elephant in the trauma room: Is this a sideways reboot of “ER,” just in Pittsburgh instead of Chicago? The show’s creative team includes “ER” vets — its creator is R. Scott Gemmill, and John Wells is among its executive producers and directors — and it stars Noah Wyle, who also an executive producer. It certainly seems to want to be “ER,” but that’s no great vice; shouldn’t everybody want to be “ER”? But it has fewer ideas, fewer moves, less energy, less specialness. In the 10 episodes made available for review (out of 15), “The Pitt” is not redefining the pace of television or pioneering a visual language.
Instead, it’s a decent enough medical drama with promising episodes as it develops. There are worse things to be, and having Wyle as the star and beating heart of the show goes a long way. He plays the boss and leader Dr. Michael Robinavitch, known as Robby, who is having a tough day because it’s the anniversary of his mentor’s death and the first day for a new group of students.
Those newbies seem pulled not from the “ER” folder but from “Grey’s Anatomy”: Here’s the one whose mom is a famous surgeon (Shabana Azeez); here’s the sad-sack guy who’s jittery and also loses a patient during his very first shift (Gerran Howell); and here’s the cocky meanie who is covering up for a bad childhood (Isa Briones). These versions of Meredith, George and Alex would benefit from a version of Cristina and Izzie, too.
The show’s shtick is that it all takes place during one 15-hour shift, with each episode of the show following an hour of real time. When deployed on “24,” that gimmick provided the foundational urgency of the story; on “The Pitt,” the emergencies themselves provide the urgency, and the clock aspect just erodes the show’s realism. Most hospital shows include an imposing administrator who swings by periodically to gripe about budget concerns and tsk-tsk our heroes. That happens here, too, but multiple times in one day.
That day is also the most didactically virtuous shift in human history, giving our characters a chance to correct a transgender patient’s gender in the computer system; support an unhoused mother wary of needing help; identify a potential human trafficking victim; address fatphobia within medicine; address anti-Blackness within medicine, particularly as it pertains to the treatment of sickle-cell anemia; provide tailored services to an autistic patient; disavow scolding as a pedagogical technique; and educate viewers about the Freedom House Ambulance Service.
But dang it, when it’s good, it is good. Robby’s advice to a grown brother and sister struggling with their elderly father’s final hours stunned me with its applicable, tragic beauty. In another scene, a mother wails over her brain-dead teen son’s body, and her scream is so wrenching and potent that all the other patients turn to look, casting a brief spell of unified compassion. A tertiary doctor character’s enthusiasm for corny puns adds a fun bit of personality in later episodes. When a colleague criticizes Robby for giving a patient’s family false hope, he shrugs. “Hope’s hope,” he says.
And for all the ways “The Pitt” seems like “ER,” to its tremendous credit, it is not actually a revival or reboot. (The estate of Michael Crichton’s, the creator of “ER,” disagrees and has filed suit. Warner Bros. Television, the studio that produces “The Pitt,” has said the suit is “baseless.”) So often during this reboot era I’ve thought, “Just … make another show” — that the “reboot” aspect was craven and tangential, that struggling to recapture magic is a miserable, fruitless pursuit when compared with attempting to make new magic. I would rather watch “The Pitt” figure itself out than watch an “ER” revival that is “Weekend at Bernie’s”-ing a premise.
