Tracy Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, and Noah Wyle star in “The Pitt.”

Courtesy: HBO Max

R. Scott Gemmill vowed that the next TV show he created wasn’t going to leave the comfort of a soundstage and shoot on-location.

Gemmill, whose previous work includes 14 seasons on NCIS: Los Angeles and eight season on ER, ended up creating the new drama The Pitt, which does, in fact, take place in a hospital.

Told in real-time over the course of 15 episodes, The Pitt follows a staff of healthcare works as they toil through one 15 hour shift in an extremely busy big city emergency room.

The series stars Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch, along with Tracy Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, Supriya Ganesh, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Gerran Howell, Shabana Azeez and Isa Briones.

Wyle also serves as an executive producer alongside Gemmill and John Wells, who also worked with Wyle on Wyle’s first series, the wildly successful medical drama ER, which debuted over 30 years ago and still is considered one of the best dramas ever on television.

Gemmill says that the idea for the series actually began with a conversation that he had with another writer during which he stated that he would never do a medical show.

“Then, after listing all the reasons, I thought, ‘maybe there’s one way I would do it,’ and so the first person I called or texted was Noah. And he said, ‘Let’s go talk to John,’ and it just went from there. It was just fun to reconnect with these guys and to try to go back to a world that we had worked in before.”

But, he says that the trio had to figure out how things in the medical field had evolved to accurately portray the field as it is now.

Wyle points out that, “The pandemic changed everything,” adding, “I was getting a lot of mail from people, first responders, about how difficult their daily lives were and who was getting sick and who was getting treated, and I pivoted a lot of that to John and said, ‘There’s something happening here that’s probably worth talking about again.’”

For Wells, it was about being able to, “actually show what these incredible physicians and nurses do all day long. We’re trying to make it feel as if you’re right on the shoulder of someone [working in the ER]

. It’s a version of a [first responder] ride-along, but with emergency room personnel.”

However, it’s not all about obscure medical conditions and patient treatment, says Wells. It’s really about the people working in the facility.

“You want these people to be the people that, when you get to the hospital, when you get to the emergency room, are actually going to take care of you, your family, your children, the people you love. I think people really want to have that experience.”

And, Wells feels that the length of the season will help viewers in getting to that level of trust with the staff. “I also think that we’ve got a thing that’s going where audiences want to connect with shows and be able to come back to that family of people over a number of episodes. I love a good short limited series, but at the end of it, I’m like, ‘I want to spend more time with those people,’ so we’re trying in these 15 episodes to really get you to know who all these people are.

ER — SEASON 1 — Pictured: Noah Wyle as Doctor John Carter — Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank

For Wyle, stepping back into the role of playing a medical profession after having played Dr. John Carter on ER for 15 seasons felt both familiar and new.

“It was so crazy putting [a stethoscope around my neck] the first time [on this show]. It’s like I have a groove in the back of my neck that it just clicks into place. It’s uncanny.”

Reflecting a bit more on how being on this new medical series feels, Wyle admits, “It would be rare for another actor to have an opportunity to revisit something that was such a huge part of their early career and that was so ingrained in their tissues and then get to play that instrument again with a little wisdom and maturity and hear the tone and how it’s changed over the years. It’s been really rewarding.”

What Wyle says he has seen are changes how people consume television . “[I think] that the level of sophistication that audiences bring to their viewing has really accelerated in the last couple of years. People have become so familiar with narrative devices and tropes and patterns that out of respect for them, you have to up your game in the way that you tell something to make it seem fresh.”

And on this series, Wyle is right in the heart of that challenge with his work writing and producing. “One of the most gratifying things I’ve been involved with in my whole career was getting to be in the writing room and learn how the sausage gets made and how thoughtfully these things are put together.”

Reminiscing a bit, Wyle says, “We showed up two weeks early [for this show] to start medical boot camp on Stage 16 [on the Warner Brothers lot], which looks out across at Stage 11 where we’d spent 15 years of our life [doing ER], and that 200 feet felt like 200 years. It felt like 20 pounds. It felt like a thousand miles. It’s really heady.”

But, he says that being a doctor on The Pitt is ‘a totally different acting exercise,’ than his time on ER.

“This is building a pressure cooker hour by hour, degree by degree, ingredient by ingredient, playing with levels of fatigue and an ability to compartmentalize things that need to be compartmentalized. This has been a wonderful psychological examination of one guy having one of the worst days of his life and the presence required in just that exercise.”

While it’s been years since ER, Wyle does feel that there is something to the saying that, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same,’ as he ruminates, “I remember [that in] 1994, ERs were the primary source of health care for most Americans. 22 million Americans didn’t have health insurance. That was part of what went into our show’s popularity, was how relevant it was at the time. And here we are 30 years later, talking about the exact same issues, except the problems have gotten a bit worse.”

For Wyle, the current status of the healthcare industry, and its perception, factors into his desire to be a part of The Pitt, and he hopes that the show will, in some way, bring about change, even if it’s nothing more than a shift in perspective. “You know, we are still playing catch up from the nuclear bomb that was dropped on the medical community in 2020 [with Covid], and it’s going to take a while to right this ship. So, part of doing this was to shine the spotlight back on this community and to hopefully inspire the next generation of health care workers to want to go into these jobs because we are going to need them. Our system is fragile. It is as fragile as the quality of support we give our practitioners.”

New episodes of ‘The Pitt’ debut on Thursdays at 9pm et on Max.