I have watched a lot of medical dramas in my time. From Scrubs to House, New Amsterdam to Doogie Howser, M.D. and even the fun Canadian soapy drama with a twist Saving Hope. I have often gravitated to the more realistic shows that focus on the patients and less on the interpersonal drama (sorry, Grey’s Anatomy). When it comes to The Pitt, this new hit Max (HBO) drama fits the bill. In fact, real-life emergency room doctors have praised the show for how accurately it depicts the tone of an emergency room and the dynamics between attending doctors and residents, nurses, and other hospital staff.
I was late to the game watching The Pitt, but I binged my way through the entire 15-episode season, and I can’t say enough great things about it.
What Is The Pitt About?
The Pitt stars Noah Wyle, who rose to fame playing a doctor decades ago in the hit medical drama ER. He’s at the center of the story once again as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the attending doctor in the emergency room of a fictional training hospital in Pittsburgh. He oversees everything that happens on the day shift, including the residents at differing levels of their learnings and nursing staff. He must also keep the peace with administration that’s always on his case about increasing patient satisfaction scores and doing more with less to increase profits.
The underlying personal story for Robby, as everyone calls him, is that several years prior, he lost his mentor and friend Dr. Adamson during the COVID-19 pandemic. Robby was in charge of his care, and he couldn’t save him. He carries this guilt with him to this day and refuses to talk to anyone about it.
What’s unique about The Pitt is that it’s told in the same style introduced by the action drama 24: every episode is delivered in real-time, covering a single hour within the grueling 15-hour shift.
The Pitt Review
I went into The Pitt with high hopes given the stellar early reviews, but I also had reservations. How can a show told at such a snail’s pace be interesting? The only way would be to introduce a series of frantic, unbelievable cases of people being wheeled through the ER seeking life-saving assistance. But this isn’t always how emergency rooms work. Usually, they’re filled with people who have runny noses and upset stomachs, tight chests, inanimate objects stuck in or through various orifices, broken limbs, and other mundane issues.
Somehow, however, The Pitt manages to combine these incidents with serious patients arriving by ambulance in a way that’s engaging and keeps you interested. Filled with complicated medical jargon (seriously, the actors deserve awards for remembering all their dialogue) and compelling character dynamics, you get a satisfying episode every time. By the end of each episode, I often felt exhausted, like I had just worked the part of the shift with them.
The show uses its platform to tackle serious and topical issues like measles, COVID, vaccines, fentanyl use, and incel culture, making a stance and educating the public on how doctors really feel about you. In one episode, for example, Robby, who has just come off the heels of a panic attack, loses his cool with a mother who refuses a specific procedure for her son despite the doctors assuring her it’s safe and necessary to prevent his condition from getting worse. She keeps referring to her phone and the information she’s finding online, noting that “it says…” referring to the barrage of medical information on the internet. He loses his cool and screams at her to put her phone down, later expressing his frustrations to another doctor about the patients who come in for help then want to resort to “Doctor Google.”
In other scenes, the residents stare up at the triage board, scanning the various ailments of patients in the waiting area, trying to cherry pick which ones they want to tackle. This might not necessarily be true in a real hospital, or perhaps only happens in a training hospital. But it makes you wonder how triage really works when it comes to non-urgent emergency room issues.
The Pitt is sort of like a show for doctors in the same way Abbott Elementary is a show for teachers of underfunded public schools. I’m not a doctor, but I can imagine the trauma, pressure, and dynamics are deeply relatable to those who are. The pain, the suffering in seeing death, devastation, and grief, day in and day out is a part of the job that many don’t consider when they’re simply in a waiting room for hours wanting to be seen for their broken toe. The need to tell a set of parents that the drug their college kid took to help them stay awake to study was laced with fentanyl and they’re now brain dead, or asking family members to make the difficult decision to pull the plug, is not to be taken lightly.
The doctors, particularly Robby, do this with a stoic face that might come across as unfeeling. But the truth is, if doctors and nurses were to absorb the sorrow of every patient they served, they wouldn’t be able to function nor do their jobs. As The Pitt suggests, however, they do absorb a lot of it, internalize, and eventually, sometimes break under the weight of it all. You just don’t see it, and often, only a select few do.
The Pitt also pays attention to the importance of residents and the pressures of performing procedures for the first time and making literal life or death decisions in mere moments. They don’t have the same confidence a doctor with 20+ years of experience has, nor do patients have the same confidence in them. But the only way to learn is to do. The show also refreshingly highlights the importance of nurses and they deep respect doctors have (or should have) for them.
The show does squeeze in some interpersonal drama, like the 20-year-old prodigy resident who feels pressure from her strict and controlling surgeon mother, the single mom and former drug addict with an ankle monitor, and the senior resident secretly trying to get pregnant through IVF. But unlike other medical dramas where the patients are secondary to the personal drama, it’s the other way around in The Pitt. This is a medical show before it’s a soapy drama, and most of the drama pertains to the work, which is the central focus.
The episodes become increasingly serious as you work your way through the hours, taking you through so many emotions along the way. There’s the loss of a child offset by a hero who saves a woman from being pushed in front of a train. There’s an angry, impatient, racist walk-in patient who does the unthinkable contrasted by the mother who literally makes herself sick to get her son into the hospital to ask for help for him. It culminates in the big episode when there’s a mass shooting at a local concert and the hospital must prep and rally together to treat the dozens of patients about to arrive with injuries of varying degrees, some already dead. Watching the way it all goes down is mesmerizing, depicting these doctors in white hospital gown hero capes.
Should You Watch The Pitt?
The Pitt is the most graphic, authentic medical drama you’ll find on television. Dr. Graham Walker, an attending physician in San Francisco, told The New York Times that he was watching and waiting for the show to screw up like so many other medical series have. “But I got through a whole episode, and they never really did.” Dr. Elizabeth Rempfer, an emergency room physician in Maryland, added that she felt like she had just worked an actual shift after watching an episode.
Dr. Lukas Ramcharran, an attending physician and assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins, told Vulture in an interview that the nature of Robby’s job, jumping from one room to another as he works with the residents, is true to life. “That’s really close to what being an attending physician is like. You’re trying to do the medicine, but you’re also there for the education of your medical residents.” He calls The Pitt the most realistic medical show he has ever seen. The only flaw Dr. Ramcharran could pinpoint was the chief medical officer Gloria (Michael Hyatt) appearing constantly to get on Robby’s case in the middle of his shift. He calls that a “bit dramatized and more vilified” than in real life. Still, we’ll accept this bit of drama given the rest of the realism.
The accuracy of the show is no surprise since, like many other medical dramas, The Pitt seeks the assistance of real-life doctors as consultants. Co-executive producer Joe Sachs, MD tells MedPageToday that they have emergency physicians on site while filming to point out discrepancies, help choreograph the medical procedures, and even ensure the actors are correctly pronouncing medical jargon.
Thanks to being on Max, you’ll get foul language, nudity, and plenty of close-up shots of all types of gross injuries and ailments, so keep that in mind if you plan to watch. There’s great detail spent with the make-up and prosthetic artists to ensure that lacerations and bruises look as realistic as possible. You’ll wince and have to turn away numerous times while watching.
But along with the more exciting dramatizations, you’ll also see the less flashy sides of an ER, like the constantly jam-packed waiting room filled with angry patients, upset they have to wait hours just to be seen. “We’re not playing Go Fish back here,” one doctor declares to the room when he has had enough of the complaints.
Watching The Pitt might result in you giving your local hospital a bit of grace, knowing or at least hoping that the doctors, residents, and nurses are doing their best. They’re likely understaffed and under-funded, pulling lengthy shifts with little nutrition and barely time for bathroom breaks. It’s a difficult job, but someone has to do it.
The Pitt is already renewed for a second season set to premiere in January 2026. The storyline will take place during the Fourth of July weekend. Expect lots of overdoses, fireworks injuries, and day-to-day emergency room drama as you gear up for another grueling 15-hour shift of the best medical show on television today.